Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads
reuters.com
reuters.com
Macs
MacBook Neo: $699 (up from $599)
13-inch MacBook Air: $1,299 (up from $1,099)
15-inch MacBook Air: $1,499 (up from $1,299)
M5 MacBook Pro: $1,999 (up from $1,699)
M5 Pro MacBook Pro: $2,499 (up from $2,199)
M5 Max MacBook Pro: $4,099 (up from $3,599)
iMac: $1,499 (up from $1,299)
M4 Max Mac Studio: $2,499 (up from $1,999)
M3 Ultra Mac Studio: $5,299 (up from $3,999)
iPad: $449 (up from $349)
11-inch iPad Air: $749 (up from $599)
13-inch iPad Air: $949 (up from $749)
11-inch iPad Pro: $1,199 (up from $999)
13-inch iPad Pro: $1,499 (up from $1,299)
iPad mini: $599 (up from $499)
Apple TV 4K: $199 (up from $129)
HomePod: $349 (up from $299)
HomePod mini: $129 (up from $99)
Vision Pro: $3,699 (up from $3,499)Was waiting for the next generation but I think I will sit it out
Oled laptop will have to wait a few years now.
Bummer
I upgraded to M5 air and use both daily and the M2 holds its own.
I have had need for active cooling once so far to get full performance.
It also caught me a bit off guard in that the Apple TV functions as a kickass hub for home automation. I ended up moving everything to HomeKit native & connected through the Apple TV, which was just automatically redundant between the 2 I have.
About the only things which irk me about it is it's an old enough chip that it doesn't have hardware AV1 decode (so sometimes I'll get a lower quality video because the highest quality is only available in AV1) and it only goes up to 4k60 instead of 4k120 (so you have to enable rate switching on either your TV or the AppleTV, which can result in black flashes as it switches, missed detections, and/or choppy UI on 24 FPS content depending on the specific combination of setup+content). That's the level of "this thing just kicks ass" the Apple TV has been at for me the last few years. $200 is getting to be quite steep... but it was honestly justifiable as worth the extra price before.
I still prefer Apple TV over other streaming boxes. We have had one in some shape or form since the very first generation and the UI is just very good. We also have the Google 4k streaming thing with Google TV or whatever it is named these days, but it's rarely used by anyone in the household.
I get the impression they want you to use other apps to access HomeKit (the Home app didn't even exist for the first one or two releases of iOS with HomeKit). Which feels very un-Apple, but whatever.
The thing that is so frustrating is that amazon only really have one platform to keep working, yet they seem to fuck it up right royally. Its so slow, it looses network all the time, it looses connection to the remote.
I then tried out an apple tv at one of my posh mates house, it turned on and was playing amazon prime content inside 20 seconds! the fire TV would have taken minutes.
I wouldn't go remotely that far, the old Apple TV blows the doors off every single Google TV hardware product in performance including the (now ironically causing the price shift) Nvidia Shield TV. Much like Car infotainment, the Smart TV market is full of awfully under-specced hardware and the Google TV Streamer is definitely not nearly close to being as fast as it should be. Plus, the Google TV Steamer is ad supported.
All of this is to say that I wish Google would make a Streamer Pro in this ~$200 price range that would just have last year's Pixel CPU and no ads.
If car infotainment is “awfully under-specced”, aviation seatback infotainment is the biggest bag of odorous excrement ever assembled
https://apex.aero/articles/cathay-pacifics-state-of-the-art-...
My OG shield is still going strong. It's all I need for streaming.
> The price of XBOX consoles will increase by US$100 for 512 GB models and US$150 for 1 TB models. We will also be sunsetting our 2 TB model.
https://kotaku.com/xbox-price-increase-2026-tariffs-buy-now-...
This is in addition to the other two recent price hikes.
Closer than I expected, but some products are quite the outliers. E.g. Apple TV is 1.54x. That's gotta hurt.
Doesn't bode well for the industry. PlayStation and Xbox both switched to mostly-commodity hardware this gen and are years old, yet also facing the same price pressure apparently
Apple doesn’t get a pass just because their contracts are many of orders of magnitude bigger.
1/ Force apple to eat a price hike. Failing that, they can:
2/ Terminate their relationship with apple
3/ Go bankrupt trying to sell $2 for $1 (which leads us back to point 1)
iPhone 6 launched without the sapphire screen and GTAT went bust.
Apple has a bit of a storied history of being the reason suppliers go bankrupt. Their contracts are usually one sided (who is going to tell Apple no and turn down that business?), and Apple does not like to be pushed around. They use multiple sourcing and pit their suppliers against one another and aren't above bullying.
It’s wild to think people can pay $2000 for the pleasure of seeing ads whenever they turn on their television (even in “apps only mod”), not to mention, I never have and will never enable the mic on the remote because fuck that, Google.
Tbh, Google TV may be one of my least favorite and most insidious Google products.
Why is the image quality on Netflix so bad? Do people really not care about not having 4k when paying for the most expensive tier of the most expensive streaming service?
The only thing not so great with Apple TV are the solutions for local media playback, OSMC and a Vero V is a better solution for that.
For reference I do this both for fun and work professionally in video workflow and pipeline solutions for 25+ years.
The plasma big screen is also not very well made, I don't know if you can even compare it to Android tv or apple tv.
And the last nail in the coffin is that you don't get apps on plasma big screen. I need my internet provider app to acees the tv channels, otherwise I'd have to pay even more, and it's not available on Linux of course.
No, really, it's not an alternative.
Do I not have to buy RAM and an SSD if I opt for a Framework?
Your point is orthogonal to the fact that the price increases are at a level that affects ANY computing device.
Microsoft said ram/storage increased prices 2.5x since late 25 and they expect it to increase another 2.5x by late 27.
Their game pass business model, which is terrible for consumers once the rug pull happens, is making them a lot of money and market share
Not sure if you have seen the recent news but things are not looking great there. Gamepass is not making them a lot of money at all. Even after acquiring Activision their operating margin is 3%
Big layoffs / studio closures coming in July, on top of the previous ones.
Internal memo: https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2026/06/10/next-100-days-xbox-re...
Spinning off Xbox: https://www.reuters.com/business/microsoft-has-considered-sp...
They just thought growth will forever be exponential until they have a billion subscribers.
How much money is it making, and how much market share?
It seems more like their game pass price hike destroyed market share. Whatever revenue it yielded them now is sure to cost them in the long term because people viewed them as price gouging and moved to playstation.
I don't understand the model, tbh. It strikes me as more useful as a loss-leader to build market share at cost to the company and make money in licensing fees long-term. But as it is, the console seems doomed.
Especially seeing as Windows is becoming less relevant to the typical consumer as well.
Watch any video from Microsoft leaders of the last years. It's all copilot copilot copilot. Not Xbox Xbox Xbox.
I mean it makes sense because "investors" are all screaming AI, not gaming. But for us it all sucks of course.
I keep seeing FLOODS of comments from people saying "at least Sony didn't raise prices1" Well, they did a month or two ago, so I have no idea why they say that. Literally everything with RAM is more expensive now.
Not sure what Microsoft has to do with this and why it's fair.
Now IS the time they will hike prices up, as sales of hardware are going to go through roof.
Apple doesn't sell anything remotely close to a loss leader.
But did you want the 128GB for AI use?
I would have thought with Apple’s scale they would have much of their memory purchases locked in to long-term supply contracts that would insulate them somewhat from the market, but I guess that isn’t the case. Either that or they’re just taking advantage of the situation to juice their profits!
Obviously one choice is “just don’t participate” but for anyone that _will_ participate, the choice is pretty much to tolerate it.
Maybe now we'll start paying attention to why software is so incredibly bloated. That giant webview runtime doesn't seem such a great idea any more.
That would be a wonderful silver lining. It's incredible how slow ~all software I use feels.
They don't even have the 512GB Mac Studio anymore, and it's uncertain if such a thing would exist in a theoretical M5 Ultra now. (If 128 GB of RAM upgrade is $1k, 512 would be $4k minimum, probably a lot more)
No one's really big enough to get stable pricing on memory except ai firms and Nvidia.
I remember when they basically bought up all of TSMCs capacity for a year.
The first thing I used to do when getting a Mac Mini was ripping out the memory and sticking in the max I could get. For a fraction of Apple's price. Some of them even had more memory than Apple offered itself.
I know there are also benefits to the soldered memory like the huge bandwidth but still. That matters mainly for very specific workloads like LLM inference.
Happens with all kind of companies: oil goes up, prices go up, record revenues for the companies. I don't see why it wouldn't happen with Apple.
“We chose to invest in future market share, believing that was in the best interest of the company” is a perfectly valid choice for the company leaders and board to make.
I had the same opinion when they released the neo. In 3-4 years time there are going to be absolutely loads of them looking shabby and tired and running very slowly. Apple has been so careful over the past 3 decades to avoid that image, I'm surprised they are happy to go down that road now.
... having end user replaceable DDR5 RAM and end user replaceable storage. Even if it is a low end underpowered laptop.
Not everyone needs to render 8K videos in 5 minutes.
All these AI companies need to stop hoarding RAM.
They could easily keep swallowing this if they wanted to.
But then they would only make $119 billion profit this year, and their reports would show negative growth. Cant have that now.
Their fiduciary duty just means they have to act in the best interest of the company and its shareholders and not act for personal gain. Apple just has to spin eating the margin as being in the best interest of those parties.
The real reason they don't isn't any duty to shareholders, its any sort of drop would wipe billions off their market cap and directly affect exec compensation.
If they ate an average $100 margin decrease on every one of those sales, that profit number wouldn’t go down from $120bn to $119bn, it would go down to $80bn.
Now you can absolutely argue that $80bn is still an excessively large number, but just so we’re being realistic about what the difference we’re looking at here is, it’s not a tiny percentage of their profits, it’s a third.
Still if I was ceo I'd take a third hit for another year and grab that sweet market share.
In fact I wonder that about the majority of the product palette nowadays
How is this excused by increased memory prices?
Sounds more like broad across the board inflation to me.
MacBook Neo: $699 (up from $599) +16.7%
13-inch MacBook Air: $1,299 (up from $1,099) +18.2%
15-inch MacBook Air: $1,499 (up from $1,299) +15.4%
M5 MacBook Pro: $1,999 (up from $1,699) +17.7%
M5 Pro MacBook Pro: $2,499 (up from $2,199) +13.6%
M5 Max MacBook Pro: $4,099 (up from $3,599) +13.9%
iMac: $1,499 (up from $1,299) +15.4%
M4 Max Mac Studio: $2,499 (up from $1,999) +25.0%
M3 Ultra Mac Studio: $5,299 (up from $3,999) +32.5%
iPad: $449 (up from $349) +28.7%
11-inch iPad Air: $749 (up from $599) +25.0%
13-inch iPad Air: $949 (up from $749) +26.7%
11-inch iPad Pro: $1,199 (up from $999) +20.0%
13-inch iPad Pro: $1,499 (up from $1,299) +15.4%
iPad mini: $599 (up from $499) +20.0%
Apple TV 4K: $199 (up from $129) +54.3%
HomePod: $349 (up from $299) +16.7%
HomePod mini: $129 (up from $99) +30.3%
Vision Pro: $3,699 (up from $3,499) +5.7%
However painful these price hikes are, and they are painful, it is worth remembering that computing has become incredibly ubiquitous and cheap.
I've got access to a couple newer laptops, but they just dont stack up to the old one.
You run OpenCode with Big Pickle on it with decent performance. So you can even vibe code on it for free.
Feels like a technology that is theoretically entirely possible but the current implementations need a lot of polish.
I suspect I can get a good 8-10 more years of use out of it, assuming components don't fail.
That's rather optimistic with that aging GPU. Upgrading to something like an Intel B580 (a $250 upgrade) would give it a second life however.
the idea of buying a new modern card having barely the performance of a card from a decade ago seems absurd on its face.
That's nonsense, the B580 is substantially faster.
https://howmanyfps.com/graphics-cards/comparisons/geforce-gt...
Speed means nothing when you aren't delivering consistency.
I hadn't considered Intel Arc though, the other comment's recommendation might be a good upgrade path for me without dropping $1k on a new GPU.
I too built a budget gaming machine last year with a ryzen whatever it is cpu, 16GB of DDR4 and a radeon rx470 or 489 with 8GB of ram. I ignore news about new games and only buy games that are on sale and less than 20€ and everything works fine. These are AAA but not newly released ones. For example I recently started playing Skyrim for example.
You don't miss what you haven't tried.
What garbage.
That's... quite the choice of words there
It's the same sort of optimization that drives behaviors where corporations feel no need to contribute to open-source projects. The same projects that enabled those very corporations to exist.
Back then devs were not taking shortcuts, it was the C API or bust, and it very much shows how far we have regressed.
It's imperceptible because the hardware has gotten so much faster. This would be like a top fuel dragster the size of a freight train.
The engine is incredibly powerful but the overall performance is hindered by the size of the overall vehicle not being optimized around it.
Apparently what users care about is having more whitespace around everything.
I care about native macOS look and feel. Sadly the entire industry has pretty much decided that this is no longer worth the effort. I miss the days when Mac users demanded more from their apps, even if it meant that some apps were not available for the platform.
There's plenty of value in the abstractions. It didn't all start to break down until we collectively decided that javascript + chromium is the only way forward for literally everything.
your phone doesn't even need mention (whatsapp request the full contact list from the OS every minute. nobody knows that. google play service usea your phone as a WiFi scanner etc)
your browser churn proof of work every site you visit. cloudflare now probably waste more power than btc (and they don't save your site from bota, only set the bar at bots-willing-to-pay-to-run-canvas-fingerprints or something)
All Electron devs, let's go back to native-er toolkits! Qt and Slint are already here for proper FOSS apps, while a new generation of research and development on the field of efficient GUI toolkits would benefit us all so much.
Not looked at Slint, thanks for the tip. Qt is OK-ish; things seem to improve on the Mac a lot beyond 6.8.
Technically, their best selling laptop has been the MacBook Air for some number of years. Maybe that changes with the Neo, which genuinely runs on a former phone chip, but a slightly older version than what's in their newest phones. Macs are running on silicon that builds on the phone architecture specifically intended to run in larger devices with larger batteries and (in most models, though not the Air) active cooling.
But they do all share a lot of design philosophy around performance per watt, and they're quite good at the moment.
(You could make the case that they shouldn't have been; I don't really know why the pundit class ever entertained the idea that an A-class processor couldn't run a Mac)
Utilitarian laptops need to come back yesterday.
Building a modern chip fab takes many years, and no one seems ready to take the plunge yet. The existing suppliers are happy to just keep raising prices instead.
https://manufacturing.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/hi-t...
So I guess the price should come down substantially in about two years.
(Except if the data center demand keeps growing to eat up that increased supply. But at that point the bottleneck might shift somewhere else, e.g. to TSMC and processor manufacturing.)
If things don't work, they will blame the computer. Developers will check and see that their electron app is only using 5GB of memory. They will test on 32GB memory M5 MBPs. Complaints to support will lead to recommendations to kill other apps.
What would make change is if MacOS killed processes above a certain limit, which obviously it would never (and should never) do.
Or the single app that slows it down.
I had a brand new experience today. I emailed someone explaining to "right-click, then…" and got a reply saying that they are left-handed, so my instructions were not applicable for them.
Average consumers, for the most part, have a magic box. Only when someone is motivated to learn, like wanting to have a better gaming experience or having an interest in media production (or code), is there incentive to learn.
iPhone's battery usage screen is a microstep in the right direction, but it doesn't go far enough since the user has to know it exists, then visit it regularly and mentally calculate if the app's energy consumption is proportional to the amount they use it.
Just consider how an app can get stuck in a 100% CPU loop on macOS (Discord/Spotify used to do this to me if they had any animations on screen) and there's literally zero indication to the user that it's happening and which app is responsible. Best they get is that the computer's fans turn on, if it has them.
One improvement would be for the app-switcher view on iOS/macOS to show you the app's battery impact and average memory consumption. Anything would be an improvement.
Then I can click it to open a dropdown that ranks the top 5 processes of each category (CPU, MEM, NET) and the amount they are consuming.
It's this kind of thing that should be built in to the OS. Makes it trivial to eyeball whether something unexpected is going on.
But how do I get to express that demand? Asking as a frustrated regular user of excel - excel is amazing software but if your laptop is not in airplane mode, the number of little delays that creep in is wild. It's all seemingly network delays, connecting to onedrive servers when i'm editing a field (why?!), 10s of connections to random microsoft domains as i flick between tabs in the UI (why?!) - each flick incurring a subtle but observable delay.
>> Dreaming is free... All Electron devs
I like your sentiment for sure but i reckon you might be barking up the wrong tree. I'll give the clearest counter example i know of:
When i scroll a buffer in Zed (it's a 120fps editor written in rust that i really want to like) i perceive micro stutters.
When i scroll a buffer in VSCode (an electron app) it's buttery smooth.
I've tried this many times over 1.5+ years of releases. It's a reliable finding on an m1 macbook pro and an m1 imac.
If the slow stack can be fast and the fast stack can be slow, then there's more to this than just tech stack.
"Whom the gods wish to destroy, they give real-time data."
The overwhelming majority of the population cannot perceive anything over 90 Hz. Those that can are overwhelmingly skewed towards under 30 years old. Fighter pilots have a floor of something like 200hz for an idea of how rare it is. Just fun info.
This isn’t true. Unless you’re saying I’m some kind of fighter pilot at 35!
To be fair, one could say the same for Zig, but Ghostty does extremely well in this regards. While it maybe doesn't have the same complexity that Zed does, it does have to deal with a lot of historical cruft of terminal emulation...
The difference between them when scrolling is.. obvious. I'm in my 40s. I'd love to see a study demonstrating that my ability to perceive this is some rare capability - that's very hard for me to believe.
I'd say maybe if you are a professional in the sector of multimedia processing, you would be so accostumed to the smoothness of high FPS that a meager 60 fps monitor would be obviously noticeable. But for the untrained eye, I feel most people wouldn't even notice in a random scenario like that, whether the screen is 60 or 120 (and that's the range with highest ROI on FPS increments!)
You know, you probably don’t feel that your car has air in the fuel line or that your transmission is holding on to old oil.
What you will “feel” is that your car feels “worse” and you won’t be able to put words on why.
Just because non-technical people lack the understanding to put into words the things they feel: does not mean they don’t feel them.
Give them Office 2008 on a 10 year old PC and ask them how it feels, I guarantee they’ll say “better” without knowing why.
> the reason nobody offers better software is that people don’t want it enough
Whether or not people 'want it enough' has very little to do with whether something actually occurs.
> average user is a little bit annoyed from time to time but not enough to actually care
When you buy software to do some task, you have a lot fewer choices, they differ wildly in other features, and it's unclear which ones perform well.
If you don't think people are willing to pay, phrase it as $100 more for software and $200 less for hardware with better overall performance.
The problem is that hardware performance is easy to upgrade and software performance isn't.
Clearly at least $100 (not adjusted for inflation) based on trends from 1990-2015.
Peoples primary reason for upgrading computer was better performance for years, after all.
It's a good thing Apple's newest computers are so power efficient, because an industry-wide decrease in RAM bloat could theoretically lead to higher CPU usage and power consumption on average.
Additionally, software is often chosen based on market effects and not necessarily based on quality. If my colleagues use Zoom, then I need to use Zoom to avoid being difficult. If they use Microsoft Office and take advantage of features that LibreOffice and other competitors can’t support well, then I’m pressured to also use Microsoft Office for compatibility reasons.
The only silver lining I see is that these price hikes will effectively freeze current software requirements in the near future, since purchasing power has been diminished. The MacBook Neo has set 8GB of RAM as the standard for casual users. I’ve found that I don’t have a good time on Windows 11 with 8GB of RAM, but 16GB provides more breathing room and 32GB is great. I don’t expect software companies to revert to the days where they needed to squeeze every kilobyte of RAM like back in the 80s and 90s, but I do expect them to be more mindful of the fact that a lot of people will be using 8GB and 16GB configurations through at least the end of the decade.
They can't. They have no clue how. Electron is all they know and I doubt they can learn anything else.
Also AI clearly hasn't replaced developers since the AI companies are also using electron and generating very buggy software.
"what Andy [Grove of Intel] giveth, Bill [Gates] taketh away."
https://lexfridman.com/ffmpeg-transcript#chapter14_assembly_...
Would love to elaborate, but need to get back to work migrating a jekyll site to astro
Built natively, the same app could use an order of magnitude less memory, while being functionally identical.
As to what its doing with all those extra resources on your linux box... shrug maybe using your laptop to train its models or mine crypto?
There’s a reason WWDC was all about apps launching faster on iOS. Apple doesn’t want to stuff more RAM in iPhones when it’s not even a spec sheet their users see or care about.
Apple always markets from a “what is the value to a consumer” angle.
So, they don’t usually lead woth “128Gigabytes of storage”, they’ll say “12million photos of your most cherished memories or 800 hours of video in high fidelity”.
Us techy people know what 128G will give us, so the marketing doesn’t land.
I bet he hated that he had to talk about it.
Or 3 modern Electron apps.
If anything good comes out of these insane prices I think it will be more effort allocated to efficiency rather than relying on consumers buying x% faster hardware every year.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36503983 - Fast machines, slow machines (2023-06-28, 346 comments)
Use dial-up internet and SCSI drives?
So even though chasing trends and always 'needing to buy' whatever new model Apple pumps out is idiotic, let's also not shill for big corporations.
Truck drivers making $80k a year and home most nights is pretty common.
I believe your experience is with the top end of the distribution.
We shouldn't! (Well, Americans shouldn't, anyways.) Americans used to spend almost a quarter of our disposable income on food, now it's more like an eighth.
https://reason.com/2025/11/27/thankfully-we-dont-have-to-spe...
Are you sure you are not comparing top 10% back in time vs median worker now? Because people make much, much more nowadays in real terms across all deciles.
you still can. Truck drivers, electricians and a lot of vocational work pays good salaries. The people who are broke with a masters degree chose a degree in something that doesn't pay. Nurses with a masters earn solid six figures. 90% of the time when I met someone with a PhD who couldn't pay rent it's a downward mobile middle class kid who thought that learning a trade was beneath them
You could buy an m3-ultra with 512GBs of unified memory at around $ 14'000 3 years ago, and that's with the already insane nonsense Apple memory markup. As a reference, the same model with 96GB costed $ 3'999. 2'000, 3'000 $ more for the 512GB model? Okay... But 10?
Furthermore, you're lucky if you can get that 3 year old machine at 25'000 $, used! Let alone they haven't even provided a similar machine for two gens.
So essentially we're going both _backwards_ and more expensive, year after year, with zero signs of any reversion till the end of the decade.
Ffs, my colleagues brand new m2 had half the ram of my 2011 MBP. 12 years later!
This is absolute madness we have never seen.
Linux with X11 runs on SBCs like the Raspberry Pi Zero, Orange Pi, etc and outputs to a monitor over HDMI.
Today smartphones, laptops and the internet are the base currency of the digital world - theres a reason Apple is so wealthy
Apple products are still luxury items. A cheap phone and a chromebook can replace most of the "base currency" features that you get when you buy Apple.
There are 15 electronic gimzo type items on this page, being sold from America’s Technology Store. 13 of the 15 you now always have in your pocket.
So here’s the list of what I’ve replaced with my iPhone.
* All weather personal stereo, [**US**]$11.88. I now use my iPhone with an Otter Box.
* AM/FM clock radio, $13.88. iPhone.
* In-Ear Stereo Phones, $7.88. Came with iPhone.
* Microthin calculator, $4.88. Swipe up on iPhone.
* Tandy 1000 TL/3, $1599. I actually owned a Tandy 1000, and I used it for games and word processing. I now do most of both of those things on my phone.
* VHS Camcorder, $799. iPhone.
* Mobile Cellular Telephone, $199. Obvs.
* Mobile CB, $49.95. Ad says “You’ll never drive ‘alone’ again!” iPhone.
* 20-Memory Speed-Dial phone, $29.95.
* Deluxe Portable CD Player, $159.95. 80 minutes of music, or 80 hours of music? iPhone.
* 10-Channel Desktop Scanner, $99.55. I still have a scanner, but I have a scanner app, too. iPhone.
* Easiest-to-Use Phone Answerer, $49.95. iPhone voicemail.
* Handheld Cassette Tape Recorder, $29.95. I use the Voice Memo app almost daily.
* BONUS REPLACEMENT: It’s not an item for sale, but at the bottom of the ad, you’re instructed to ‘check your phone book for the Radio Shack Store nearest you.’ Do you even know how to use a phone book?
You’d have spent [US]$3,054.82 in 1991 to buy all the stuff in this ad that you can now do with your phone.
That US$1600 (in 1991) Tandy 1600 runs a 286 CPU and has a 20MB hard drive, and supported 640×200×16 resolution (720×350 mode for monochrome monitors):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_1000#Tandy_1000_SL_and_T...
But it’s an add, obviously it’s trying to sell you something not actually be accurate.
I have a digital audio player and it’s the size of a matchbox, with removable storage (now with a 512GB catd), and turn on under 10 seconds. And that tape recorder could be replaced with a very small device too. And I still have my casio calculator from college and that’s what I use if I need to if I need to do a series of computations.
Building a gaming PC right now is no longer affordable. I can't even upgrade my hard drives because they have tripled in price. And it's all because of good old capitalism.
If it were just that they’re enjoying the insane demand, they’d necessarily be leaving billions on the table for someone else.
Computing is definitely cheaper, but crappy software seems to always seams to step up to the occasion and use up the extra cycles.
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/economy/ipad-price-remark-ge...
I.e. computing is cheap compared to the past, but it only makes it that much more painful we went from "it'll be so much faster soon!" to "at least it's cheaper than it used to be" and now to "oh wow, it's like the reverse 90s these last 2-3 years!".
I think this is now technically the best investment I've ever made.
Over the lifespans of these devices, a few hundred dollars doesn't matter much. I don't really care.
I do care that the prices are a reasonable reflection of market realities and that their profit margins aren't expanded compared to the last several years', but assuming these increases are actually necessary: okay.
During the last 10 years the prices of computing equipment have been increasing slowly until this last year, when they have jumped upwards thanks to the AI companies and to the measures taken by the US government to sabotage the Chinese competition in the memory market.
I'm not complaining - this is the way of these things. But even 3 orders of magnitude of performance weighted price reduction doesn't pay for healthcare or education. An increase in the price of necessary tools we need for our day-to-day livelihoods is felt.
Today, software can do insane things with video, AI, graphics.. But the basics have gotten fat. Browsers and OSes are hungry monsters demanding you to have as much CPU and memory as possible.
Counterpoint: it's also become essential and poorly optimized.
Back then you could live quite well without ever using a computer, but during COVID you literally had to have a phone or the governments wouldn't let you move around in certain cases. Many services are restricted or inaccessible without a computer.
Computers have become cheap if you want to run 1996 software, but the two Gmail tabs have have open (work and personal) are costing me 2GiB and 779MiB of RAM respectively. I have no idea how it takes 2GiB to display an inbox with 4 emails in it.
Even with these prices, we are still getting a lot of bang for our buck.
It's easy enough to build a $10k rig. Apple sells a studio that's closer to $7k.
Not to mention a lot of these price hikes will need to major improvements in the coming years that were either previously not possible / sustainable or pulled in a few years forward.
And I agreed! So… holy shit. I think we're going to see even further price increases across the industry. There already were a ton, but it can always get worse, of course.
Thank you, OpenAI. What would have we done without your attempts at monopolizing destroying the memory market.
Unfortunately, I think regulatory capture is so deep now in most places, one can hardly expect anyone to do anything about it.
The proposed regulation would be that if a single company/industry buying up supply to the point it starts driving significant inflation for such and such goods, they would be severely restricted from doing so going forward.
If your country restricted a company from buying too much of a product they need, 10 other competitor companies in other countries would be formed the very next day offering to do the work in their country for a minimal fee.
This is a global market. Supply and demand isn’t going to be cancelled out by politicians in one country trying to squeeze the market.
If you did restrict companies from buying things they need, you would see all future companies in that space incorporated in other countries.
It’s weird to read all of the calls for regulation to fix this when the DRAM and chip production is happening in other countries.
Maybe we need the same now for computer parts, that are now so important for everything in our modern digital society ?
So that feverish investor speculation and shady circular financing deals don't cause sudden 30+% inflation on any technological device.
Reality check: a strategic reserve of modern technology components in volumes needed to impact consumer prices is completely infeasible and illogical.
I’d be fine with the idea of the government maintaining supplies of defense industrial inputs, critical minerals, etc; but as we see with our efforts for rare earths (and even petroleum) you can never stockpile consumer supply levels.
Apple, Raspberry Pi, Supermicro, and OpenAI all have the same claim to supply you do: you can buy it with money, with the seller being allowed to charge what they want. In fact, high prices are going to be the only way to stimulate supply and encourage the billion dollar investment in additional memory fabs. Price controls or other supply-killing mechanisms are known not to work - it’s Econ 101.
Hopefully you'll agree that there's a difference between even a large buyer like Apple reserving a large chunk of DRAM supply to put in their products that they sell to consumers, and the anti-competitive behavior by OpenAI that I describe above.
That, and putting Sam Altman in jail for being a lying fraudster.
The question is always: What specific regulation?
Regulation is not the magic silver bullet that some want to make it out to be.
You’re not going to solve a global supply and demand change by regulating companies to not buy too many things. The supply would go to other countries. Companies would open international subsidiaries that built the data centers in other countries. Companies would move to other countries which didn’t try to stop them from buying components on the free market.
You can’t regulate companies into keeping prices down. This is an international market. If you passed a law that said RAM had to be sold for no more than 30% higher than last year’s price, the international memory companies would laugh and stop sending RAM to that country.
> Unfortunately, I think regulatory capture is so deep now in most places, one can hardly expect anyone to do anything about it.
I think you need to broaden your understanding of how the DRAM supply chain works and which countries are involved. You can’t mandate low prices for a global commodity. You can try, but the supply will just disappear for that country.
No regulation would catch 100% of this, nor is it meant to. But it can definitely deal with companies opening international subsidiaries etc. Sanctions can be worked around too, but that's a hassle and so countries/companies/individuals generally try to avoid them at all costs.
You’re still imagining this as a purely single-country issue.
The demand for AI data centers is global. If OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI weren’t building them, other companies would step in to provide data center services for a fee. Now you have the same buildout, just less efficient and more expensive for the end consumers because we’re paying a new middleman for the compute.
The regulation maximalists would argue that we could then forbid companies from buying foreign data center capacity, but then that means other companies would appear in those other countries offering the AI inference service.
What you’re missing is that this is a global supply and demand issue and you can’t solve it with domestic regulations.
That might actually be the goal. A more fragmented market would mean each participant has less money, so they would try to watch their costs a bit more closely. The innovation rate (in non-cost-cutting areas) would probably decrease, maybe even substantially... which some people happen to consistently advocate for. A lot of lost efficiency would be reclaimed in a few years, but the whole system would be more stable, cheaper, and less centralized as a side effect.
Yeah, it would be suicidal to do that when it's your budget that gets the taxes from those giant corporations; who would want to willingly reduce their income for years? The rest of the world would benefit tremendously, but it could be a net plus (socially, politically, if not purely economically) in 5-7 years down the road - even in the country currently benefiting from the corporations the most. But that would be one to two lost elections too late, even if it turned true. So, while it won't happen, if it did, I don't believe we'd be worse for it.
Not saying there isn’t demand, but it’s definitely artificially inflated by VC-fomo and circular-funding ~~fraud~~ shenanigans.
> If OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI weren’t building them
One of these companies is responsible for buying up DRAM wafers, in what still appears to be an attempt to deny them to everyone else, and another one of these companies seemingly exists to launder money for a fascist billionaire.
Fascist trillionaire
This could range from quanta mandates on the supply side (the RAM manufacturers themselves in this case) to imposing secondary sanctions on 'other companies [that] would step in to provide data center services for a fee'
If the US and the EU did this, these other companies would be mega careful about to whom and how they provide services to, the same way Chinese private companies today are generally super careful about not violating US sanctions.
There is currently more demand than supply in the entire world.
If the US and EU got together and told DRAM companies that we're going to sanction them if they don't give us cheap RAM, 10 other countries would roll out the red carpet to come bring that DRAM into their countries instead. The data centers would be built there. Then the US and EU would be compute-starved and have no choice but to go to these other countries for compute.
I suggest you read up on the history of attempts to control prices of oil throughout history. Oil is an order of magnitude bigger market than DRAM. If you think it's realistic to suggest that the EU and US could sanction entire countries into keeping some chip prices down so people can save a couple hundred dollars on their next laptop, this isn't a conversation grounded in reality.
These 10 countries need the US/EU market for their exports.
But you keep talking as if I am saying I want to sanction those who build more DRAM. No, I want more DRAM, not less!
> we're going to sanction them if they don't give us cheap RAM
That's not what the proposal was. The proposal was to limit the ability of AI goons to completely buy the DRAM market out so that everyone else is forced to pay substantially more.
If the problem is that it feeds into general inflation then it is suddenly not merely 'so people can save a couple hundred dollars on their next laptop'.
It's like oil, it feeds into everything; manufacturing, delivery of goods to your local supermarket, flights etc. etc. you can't simply say 'hey I don't drive a car so high oil prices don't affect me'.
If enterprises and consumers alike are forced to spend substantially more on DRAM, they won't be able to spend on other things and the whole economy will slow down.
I'd argue that's incentive enough.
The DRAM companies would be building more if they could.
You can't sanction your way into squeezing blood from a stone.
> If enterprises and consumers alike are forced to spend substantially more on DRAM, they won't be able to spend on other things and the whole economy will slow down.
If a country came along and declared that companies couldn't buy the resources they need from other companies, the second order effect would be every major company relocating their headquarters out of that country as soon as possible, along with a sharp decrease in startups being formed in that country.
The economic impacts of this level of command-and-control government would be devastating to the economy. Much more than having to spend a few hundred dollars more on a laptop every 5-10 years.
You keep arguing as if there's only one side to this, the producers/DRAM companies who can't scale production fast enough.
But there's two sides to a market, the producers (DRAM makers) and the consumers, (AI industry). I am arguing for increasing the supply by taking some away from the AI industry. This is BECAUSE on the production side there's no way to address this fast enough.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_10_...
It sucks that DRAM is so expensive, but it is for a good (economically useful) cause.
Ah yes, "We have to do something! Something must be better than nothing!"
Famous last words before freedoms of all varieties are eroded.
Then, let's see how quickly I can reinterpret whatever power you've grabbed in the name of "doing something" and pervert it for some other nefarious purpose, or just generally bypass the intent entirely as a motivated actor with limitless funds.
Many regulations, once passed, impact only those incapable of navigating around them - typically, the less-fortunate. Invariably, power taken in the name of some transient issue is never later relinquished.
The fact that you ask the important question and then continue to kneejerk at the mention of "regulations" shows the REAL problem. People have problems DISCUSSING the idea. Everyone in the world knows that regulations can be stupid, but that's not the sole property of government, businesses can be colossally stupid too.
My comment was discussing the idea. If you have ideas to discuss, let’s discuss those too.
What I have a problem with is the demand that we accept that regulation will fix everything, but every discussion about the actual effects of regulation gets dismissed.
When an idea only looks good if you can prevent people from discussing the details, it’s probably not a good idea.
Businesses don't generally have the ability to take freedoms, power, etc. and then never relinquish control - their stupidity (in theory) has limited impact on everyone else.
They have those powers when they're allowed to become monopolies. Unregulated capitalism leads to monopolies and slavery as they're the best way to capture all capital. Company towns, company stores, company scrip, etc.
You're absolutely right that we can't solve this by regulating DRAM prices. How we got to a situation where a handful of companies can spike the price of consumer electronics several times what it was only a few years ago and these same companies have become the centralized source for information is a journey decades in the making at this point. Decades of insufficient regulations, insufficient enforcement of existing regulations and the lack of any organized efforts to change it.
Microsoft should have been broken up in 2001. The American government should have taken that threat seriously. Governments around the world should have. The dependence of all levels of governments on one single American company for their desktop operating systems and productivity software as well as the spying opportunities that gave American companies and intelligence entities was a grave threat and regulated better to avoid entrenched foreign monopolies. But they didn't. 25 years later and Microsoft still dominates the home OS market and office environment, they have a sizable portion of the cloud, they recently took a huge chunk of the game industry and now the AI industry with their investment in OpenAI.
Even though there's a direct line between a historical lack of regulation on a monopoly like Microsoft and the rise of OpenAI leading to the spike in ram prices it isn't just about Microsoft. You can paint similar pictures about Google, Oracle, Facebook, or Amazon. But to me it isn't just about these companies and regulations/actions directed specifically them but the broader misregulations that have stifled market health and dysfunction that has allowed these criminal organizations to have so much influence.
There could have been real enforcement with criminal penalties and fines that exceed the profits and costs associated with the high-tech employee antitrust litigation.[0] Not doing so has just allowed wealth to continue to accumulate in the hands of criminal people, who not surprisingly continue to do shitty things in their quest for profit. Why were there no personal consequences to Eric Schmidt[1] for these actions, let alone consequences that would have prevented him from attaining the position of influence that he currently has?
The notion of the right to repair should have superseded the DMCA and laws should have been adopted to punish noteworthy companies that lobbied for it and profited from it. There should be more of a focus on governmental standards mandated open interoperability to prevent walled garden business models. This would have kneecapped wealth accumulation among a few corruption groups and allowed a richer more competitive market to flourish. DMCA and copyright extension, WIPO harmonizing of trade law should all have been swept away.
Where's the fallout from Snowden? Were there any massive institutional reforms there? Any jail time for people in government and industry who were involved? How did the lack of regulations and and lasting reform around that debacle shape American society at large and the tech industry?
Everything that we're experiencing today is the result of decades of choices to not regulate the tech industry in any way that resembles other industries. It is a global collective choice to cede power to private individuals based out of the west coast of the US.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
Yet the AI labs are speculating on usage, and spending money from investments without clear revenue path.
See: https://www.wheresyoured.at/brokenomics/ for an interesting write-up on the economics of AI.
It's easy to falsify the claim with a simple experiment: imagine they had no customer at all, $0 in revenue. Their costs would still be massive. If the claim were true, $0 revenue should mean $0 costs, right?
Meanwhile, component makers will surely be spinning up more capacity, some of them in a foolhardy manner, and if the bubble does burst, 3-6 months later we'll be seeing fire sales on components and component makers going bankrupt (or getting bailouts, if considered of national importance)
Doesn't mean people would legitimately use them enough to warrant such infrastracture demand, if they were priced according to actual costs.
So it's a distorted market.
It is more expensive? yeah
Is it "definitely not below cost"? hardly
except if as cost here only the inference cost is considered, and not the capital investment, and maintenance costs (not to mention r&d, marketing, and others).
to put it another way, if they just had the corporate API subs today, would they be profitable?
> Anyone who’s spent any time in New York City knows that when it begins to rain, two things happen immediately: It becomes easier to buy an umbrella and it becomes harder to hail a cab. As soon as the first few drops fall, people appear on the street selling cheap umbrellas, while a lucky few pedestrians occupy all the available cabs.
Even though the elasticity of supply for taxis is less, rain encourages taxis to get on the road, and work longer to serve the spike in demand. With ride sharing apps the pool of supply is even more elastic.
And let’s suppose none of these make a mark and a new factory needs to be built or something. This means: 1. You wait for build out and prices go down. 2. Prices go down anyway because demand is not sustainable.
And to turn it around, when you buy an expensive GPU to play computer games you are claiming a valuable industrial resource. Should the government subsidize your home consumption use case? Computer technology is a scarce resource with many uses.
All existing factories have maximized their production.
> factories but are not making ram switch
It takes 2-3 years to switch, by which time demand may have satisfied from other manufacturers building additional capacity. So ironically, investing too much into new capacity can be dangerous.
> Large consumers of ram use alternatives, broadening the supply
What alternative exists for NAND flash?
Citation needed.
This is almost certainly not true because capacity is not binary but an efficiency curve. As the cost of RAM increases it becomes economical to operate the factory at higher capacities.
> It takes 2-3 years to switch
Citation needed. Who sets the max speed limit for changing?
> What alternative exists for NAND flash?
There is a whole range of suppliers. The alternative is which flash and who manufactures it.
https://download.intel.com/newsroom/2022/manufacturing/fab-f...
And even if someone were able to magically build one in half the time, that would certainly drive up the cost quite dramatically, and would still be two-ish years from production.
The history of the memory industry is jam-packed with booms and busts, and companies that over-provisioned capacity during the boom times, only to have the bust happen as the fab is coming on line, are the ones that fail.
=-=-=-=
"William de Gale, portfolio manager at BlueBox Asset Management, told CNBC’s Europe Early Edition on Wednesday that the industry tends to have “enormous ups and downs”.
“In the long run it’s a pretty dreadful industry,” he said.
“I suspect that’s still the case every time people make an argument that the memory cycle is gone, and it’s now a long-term value-creating industry – just before it all goes horribly wrong.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/25/memory-stocks-cyclical-boom-...
There are only 6. Samsung, SK Hynix, Kioxia, Micron, WD, and YMTC.
5 operate as a price-fixing cartel, and the sixth is Chinese domestic.
They certainly have the money to get it done in house, long-term, why? after this fiasco, the Chinese are going to have a much bigger piece of the memory market worldwide. So strategically, it pays to bring it memory in house in partnership with TSMC in Arizona or Oregon.
Then I can be like: well, the trip sends me to the boonies, so maybe I'll have a printed/offline map as a backup, just in case.
Technically, sure, but there are jobs that require you to have a phone (at many different career points too), colleges that expect it, and more. And while there may be workarounds, they are often workarounds at someone else's expense, such as asking someone else to check the class schedule or work schedule.
So yes. You don't need to own a smart phone. And you don't need to own shoes. Both will get you (understandable) looks from general society. Both will limit what you can do. Both are somewhat understandable as having become a default, expected thing that people WILL have.
In that context, it is not only technically true that you do not need to buy those products. This simply does not strike me as an issue where the government would need to step in and regulate the market.
I don’t think government needs to get involved in the West, but some of those companies affected that have the resources are gonna have to reconfigure themselves and design around the three memory companies. The Chinese certainly will.
Here's your problem. This is not a consumer or Apple-specific issue whatsoever. Computing hardware is critical infrastructure in the digital age. The AI boom is inflating the cost of almost all compute for every business, including the cost of all cloud computing.
It's alot like housing, in that the average cost of housing directly inflates the average cost of living, impacting the poorer many orders of magnitude more than the richer. When all governments, companies, and individuals depend on computers to amplify productivity or deliver services, a significant increase in price will impact every government, company, and indiviudal.
An extremely small number of individuals or orgs being able to dramatically impact critical infra, and the cost of living – regardless of why – is a major national security and supply chain failure. This is the entire reason why monopolies and too-big-to-fail entities are bad for everyone, and anti-trust laws were created to being with; to prevent an extreme minority from influencing markets in such a way that it is detrimental to consumers and other market players or sectors.
--Adam Smith (yes, that Adam Smith) _Inquiry into the Nature And Causes of the Wealth of Nations_
My banks in the US and abroad all require 2fa and some of them are app-based 2fa not just SMS. All traditional banks- no neobanks.
Some government services require apps or the experience is infinitely worse without a smartphone.
Do we need the newest/fastest/best? Probably not, but I don’t see any major mobile OS making software more efficient for older/ lesser hardware and if you try to hold onto your old phone eventually it will be vulnerable to attacks after support for it ends.
It’s gross.
Close down would be a good idea.
Between the dire economy, the oil and materials crisis due to conflict, the trade wars and the tarrifs, why would anyone expect it to be otherwise?
I happened to buy an iPad 2 days ago, dang I got lucky. I thought they’d announce before the iPhone launch but had no idea it would be this soon.
All their other products are lower volume.
So maybe their mobile hardware will be next.
>Just yesterday I saw people saying that Apple wouldn't increase prices until the next refresh.
That was from Gruber, a person who claimed USB-C was invented by Apple, AirPod was sold at a loss.
Generally speaking understanding of Margins, Supply Chain, Manufacturing and Hardware Business manufacturing is still very low across the internet.
I thought they were soldered to the motherboard?
And no, the memory in the Neo is not soldered to the motherboard, it is the upper part of the SoC sandwich package.
https://3dfabric.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/technolog...
Even today the desktop PC market is still stuck on USB-A since they have no Apple equivalent to just get things done.
All small cameras and devices use micro SD. Professional cameras don’t use SD since forever now. Basically I always need an adapter now.
Apple doesn't get solo credit for USB-C, but they were certainly essential to it. Just compare the USB-C physical interface to the USB-3 micro or super speed type B ports and compare design sensibilities.
https://open.substack.com/pub/theelectronvault/p/apple-cinem...
USB-C can fulfill some/all of what I was using Thunderbolt 2 for with a MacBook Air and a Thunderbolt Display in 2013. Going back far enough, Apple combined video and data into the HDI 45 connector in the mid-to-late 90’s (but no one was going to use that for a laptop, even a laptop of the era). It was chunky enough even on a Power Mac 6100 and display then.
USB-C / TB is the latest example of a direction Apple has been moving in for a long time.
Given that the price change is broadly in line with the rest of the lineup, were all of those products mispriced since the beginning too? Or is it possible you’re simply cherry picking the one thing you want to be right about while ignoring the broader context of memory prices going up?
I can't comment on the AirPod margins, but USB-C was, at least in large part, designed by Apple. That's absolutely true. They weren't the only people on USB-IF committees, but certainly played (and play) a very heavy hand in the USB-C spec.
That seems fair, I know plenty of people who think Apple only used USB-C because they were forced to. Lots of gut feelings out there.
It's a fact. Not a feeling.
Apple would have moved away from Lightning eventually. Did Europe force that move a year sooner than otherwise? Maybe. Maybe not.
The EU law forced them. The law is the indication.
There is zero chance that Apple wasn’t going to do this themselves anyway in the next year or two. They’d been aggressively converting everything else in their device portfolio to USB-C and were doing so way ahead of everyone else.
People who think this only happened because of the EU are high as a kite.
> For the same reason, I also do not think they’re going to raise the prices of existing products mid-cycle. ... But unlike with the MacBook Pros in March, I wouldn’t bet more than a beverage on my hunch here. However out of character it would be for Apple to raise prices midway through product cycles, the global RAM shortage is unprecedented. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple pushes price increases moments after I hit “Publish” on this post.
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/06/22/apple-device-pr...
I collect fountain pens which have nothing to do with the data center market and the big 3 Japanese makers announced pretty substantial price hikes.
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/25/apple-explains-why-it-r...
Don't trust a fox to count your chickens.
Also RAM is impacting other components such as SSD
Year Average Spot Rate (USD)
2006 $1,825
2007 $1,775
2008 $1,383
2009 $1,350
2010 $1,900
2011 $1,450
2012 $2,000
2013 $1,750
2014 $1,900
2015 $1,125
2016 $1,350
2017 $1,525
2018 $1,775
2019 $1,490
2020 $3,008
2021 $8,608
2022 $5,500
2023 $1,575
2024 $4,740
2025 $3,150
2026 (YTD) $3,835
I suspect some might prefer 1984 for the stability, some might prefer Brave New World for the Soma and some might prefer Wall-E because life looks good with B+L.
It's a fucking miserable future for us software people.
Architecting and "good taste" won't be good enough to put food on the table next year...
A flood of fly by night products with low effort mess is going to lower the trust in genuine indie development products and could drive users towards established names in the industry.
In some way it's like the new PR flood on github. On the surface more PRs looks like a positive thing but it had unintended consequences.
More shots at the big names is not going to entrench them, even if most of those shots don't go anywhere.
The big names also need to stay competitive against internally developed solutions inside what would have been their bread-and-butter enterprise customers, so they have to compete on features and quality like indies.
Come on now, you can’t be mad that people acquired the skills.
Realize that whatever your frustration is, those people who acquired the skills are probably not the root cause of whatever is currently going on, in the bigger picture sense.
Maybe a lot of them can now put food on their table.
I sincerely hope things work out for you.
I'm only 20, but everyone used to talk about how excited they were for the future. I don't know anyone who is excited for the future.
It upsets me I never got to live the "glory days" of cars, technology, outdoor activities, music, entertainment, etc.
I only see it getting significantly worse too. It's hard not to fall into the trap of doomerism but what is the point anymore?
I now feel the same as you (despite being a bit older), the future looks depressing as hell. It seems to me that things are just progressively getting noticeably worse in the last 10 years or so.
The best is ahead for your generation - you just need to create it from grass roots. I mean actually "Think different" instead of what Apple and the others marketed to you. Take back power and culture from the centralized corporations and taste-makers that feed/market their slop to you. Reclaim tools. Reclaim community. Don't seek salvation in consumerism - it's what got us here.
I think its incredibly easy to say "You just need to do everything yourself" when you put us here. When you lived the free life before, your fulfillment is mostly met, even if it does go down hill from here since you lived through some of the best eras of human history.
You are right, and you have a right to resent what many in the previous generation did (or tacitly ignored) to get us here.
> I think its incredibly easy to say "You just need to do everything yourself" when you put us here.
Don't do it yourself. Do it with others.
> When you lived the free life before, your fulfillment is mostly met, even if it does go down hill from here since you lived through some of the best eras of human history.
Don't mistake the illusion of freedom sold to previous generations through consumerism (which I'm inferring from your initial comments referencing all kinds of consumable things previous generations had).
Today, we have incredibly freeing technologies that were unimaginable generations earlier, like for example, distributed carbon-free energy generation and storage.
The best things you will do will be to rebuild a better world than the ones your predecessors left you, and it will be way cooler than our gas guzzlers and Gameboys ever were.
The problem exacerbated from decades and decades of causes piling up into today's effects. You are not going to undo all of that magically even with sweeping legislation or communal will. The future of a good world is still there but maybe not for us to savor.
I think we really can conquer cancer, Alzheimer's and maybe even senescence in the next 20-30 years.
To me the really disturbing thing is; if the rich stop dying we’re fucked forever. At least now when they die their wealth gets distributed to their heirs and sometimes squandered. Elon and Bezos and their kind will simply continue to accumulate.
I agree with you on medical advancements, but I am skeptical about curing cancer (which is really curing hundreds of different diseases) any time soon. Alzheimer's might be nearer and a cure could come from a big breakthrough, but that's still in "I'll believe it when I see it" territory.
Senescence... oof, I think we're a good century or so from figuring that out, at best. And even if you're right, I expect this to be a closely-guarded medical technology, with near-immortality only available to the super-wealthy.
Fusion power has been constantly "on the horizon" since before I was born, and I'm not convinced it's any closer just yet.
Space travel is... mixed. It's amazing that the costs to getting things into space have been going down, and amazing that we have things like the JWST and so many different organizations and countries sending stuff up, but it's depressing that one single company (run by a megalomaniac) is so far ahead and owns all the technology to bring those costs down. The commercialization of space is not something I'm looking forward to, and I expect governments to do their typically shitty stuff when it comes to space.
Ugh, writing this all out made me sad.
I think it's too late for that anyway. Peak oil, climate change, biodiversity loss (we are measurably living in a mass extinction era), those problems are here and now. Fusion may help (?) slightly reduce climate change but the only thing that can stop it is the end of fossil fuels (every time we emit CO2 we make the climate worse for the next generations). But fusion couldn't change the fact that we are living in a mass extinction that is orders of magnitude faster than the one of the dinosaurs: this one is unrelated to CO2 or climate change, just humans destroying wildlife habitat. Fusion may actually allow us to make it worse.
> Space travel is... mixed
Space travel is a big joke. The only advantage of looking for solutions to survive at scale on Mars is that we are rapidly transforming Earth into something that is as bad as Mars, and we many need suits and bunkers to survive here before the end of our lives. That's a bit ironic.
Mars: more like we are rapidly transforming earth into Venus.
We can do a little bit each year. We don't have to tap into all of our social services, cops on the street, clean water, and create an entire surveillance and surveillance capital infrastructure to get there by 2050 or even 2100.
We can aim to get there by, say, the year 100,000, and still have 4000x headroom.
Meanwhile we live healthy, safe, low-stress lives, where fun, outdoor activity, swimming in rivers, picking fruit from trees, having all night parties outdoors, swilling beer, reading great books, napping in hammocks, camping in the mountains are all freely available.
The fact is: we are failing to survive on Earth. I don't see how you can live a "low-stress life" given what's coming. Unless you have fun enjoying a nature where everything is dead. Maybe attaching the hammock to the cybertruck? I don't know.
and i'm saying: let's not wreck ourselves trying to get to Mars/beyond the solar system in the next century. Let's background it. Live gently in the meantime.
I think the disagreement is you believe we're already kinda screwed? I haven't commented on that possibility previously. I'm not fully qualified nor informed enough to make a decisive opinion. But it does seem like it will very uncomfortable for a long time. And it's very difficult to get people to change their minds when the surveillance capital propaganda continuously shapes our conscious imagination to its own constraints.
> I think the disagreement is you believe we're already kinda screwed?
Well it depends on what we mean by "screwed". Society will change, that's a fact. Maybe we choose to change it to save as much as we can (e.g. drastically reduce our CO2 emissions, choose to degrow and adapt) or we don't, and we will end up drastically reducing our CO2 emissions anyway (we've passed/are passing peak production for fossil fuels, they are not infinite so emissions will get lower in the next years/decades, that is absolutely certain). And if we don't adapt, the day fossil energy becomes sparse, the degrowth will be harder.
Some say "no but wait, they (someone else, not me) will find infinite clean energy, so we're saved". Which is naive because probably they will not, even if they did it would take enough time to screw the climate even more, and that would not solve the biodiversity issue we have. We have lost 80% of insects in 20 years (we measure it), we are emptying the oceans. We are living in a mass extinction (we measure it) that is happening orders of magnitudes faster than the one of the dinosaurs. And this mass extinction is NOT due to climate change, only to the human activity (whatever humans do when they have energy, like destroying habitats). Climate change is just adding to the fun.
Right now we're losing insects and emptying the oceans, eventually it will have an impact on the crops we can grow, and hence on our food. "But wait, they (someone else, not me) may find a pill so that we don't need to eat anymore!" doesn't work for me: I don't want to live on a planet without nature like Mars, I want to live on Earth. Not to mention that the Amazon is pretty much lost at this point, most coral reefs are pretty much lost already (or will soon be?).
That's not super fun. Are we screwed? Depends on what it means. Life will get more complicated for most people, that's for sure.
Hopefully, but there is something we know we cannot change in the next decade, and that's climate change. Heard of the heatwaves happening right now? That's only the beginning.
The only way it could stay as bad as it is today would be to reduce the emissions to 0 right now. There is no coming back, once the CO2 is in the atmosphere it stays there for much longer than your lifespan.
Of course we won't cut the emissions in the next few years (kind reminder that they keep increasing actually), so every year will be worse.
And I'm not talking about the energy crisis that's coming. Nor about the current mass extinction we are living: biodiversity is measurably dropping, and until now it was NOT due to climate change (only human activity and habitat loss). Now climate change adds up as a bonus.
It's probably time to enjoy seeing insects and the occasional wild life. We probably won't go to Mars, but we're making the Earth look like Mars, so we may all get to live in a "bunker" and have to were a suit outside before the end of our life.
I've always been a tech nerd, from my first Gameboy in 1998 when I was 10, to my first PC, then getting all sorts of gadgets and upgrades. Always an early adopter to many things, even social media and AI. I was basically a day 1 adopter of Facebook when it became available worldwide. I was there before Gangnam Style hit the 313 YouTube views limit (I was the 214th watcher)
Tesla was a brand I was fully on board with and planning as my first 'new' car. I loved the idea of self-driving cars (mainly because I hate driving). But then Elon became a menace and I had no interest in what would have been my dream car. It still is, and I would easily buy if Elon didn't have his name attached.
Technology has SO MUCH potential today, more so than in the past. But EVERYTHING these days from MBAs: If it doesn't make money, it gets dropped. It all has a subscription, not a one-off purchase. Every tiny thing has a cost of business involved. Games are no longer about having fun, they're about how much money or activity can I extract from the player (yes, even the indie experience is tainted: buy off Steam and 30% of that purchase goes to the platform for just existing).
The future with AI is ultimately the untimely demise of creativeness. And it will be shoved down our throats, and we will thank them (the ruling class) for it.
But for every good thing technology brings, it seems like we create bad things by the thousands. And it seems like capable introverts becoming rich and powerful are actually extremely dangerous.
Most technology is part of the problem. There is no good solution (our lives will just get gradually worse from now on), but the best one involves removing the bad technology and keep only the good part, which is a very small minority of technology today.
We're pretty much screwed, and the only way not to see it is to not look into the biggest problems of our time: energy, climate and mass extinction.
This is a HUGE overstatement, tbh. Without such big worldwide distributors like Steam, the only option an average indie dev would have is to distribute their game on their website that nobody knows about, so instead of hundreds of 1000s of sold copies they would have just some 1000s
Another non-obvious outcome of Steam is that the pirate scene largely just went away. It so niche that nobody really cares about it for real. It’s just so much easier and safer to buy
So I would say that Steam, Apple and so on have earned their 30%, they really created a huge market everyone can get a share in. Surely it should be regulated to avoid hostile monopoly behavior, but that’s a different story
The carriage owners in this metaphor are the capital class.
Again, you are excited about the future of a technology that is rapidly making you obsolete. It is not going to go how you think it is going to go.
I think you basically have to accept there will be one of two options -- either it scales at something like O(n), in which case you have some number of highly skilled professional which can use AI to do the work of 100x of a SWE today (that would be a pretty cool job). Or it scales with something like O(1). I think in the second world the only logical conclusion is that AI is so incredibly capable that the world is profoundly and utterly transformed. If AI can do the work of any SWE without oversight, it can basically do anything -- which would mean that any need you have could be satisfied. If you are hungry, food could be grown. If you are thirsty, water could be procured. Or you would need to propose some crazy future where AGI is achieved but for some reason trivial things like this can't be solved.
I think the thing that makes me the most nervous is some enemy actor going rogue with AI and killing us all, but somehow we've lived for decades with enemy actors having access to nuclear and bioweapons and somehow we are all still here.
I don't know how to make it any clearer that you are the horse in this analogy. Hoping that you're one of the 5% of horses that gets kept around for racing, dressage, or farm labor when the other 95% of carriage horses are put out to pasture does not make this future any less bleak if you're a horse. If you don’t understand that decimating demand for your profession (and knowledge workers in general) overnight will do the same to wages, you are in for a rude awakening.
That you think AI doing the work of any SWE means that "any need you have could be satisfied" is fantasy. Not only are most of the things people want not the result of software engineering, but the notion that the billionaire owners of AIs intend to use them to fully provide for the wants and needs of the masses of humans who have suddenly been rendered economically useless is absolutely wild.
For perhaps a more salient example, take a look at what happened to laborers during the industrial revolution. Wages collapsed by 60–80% over four decades. It took something over eighty years (and that's considered a lowball estimate) for things to recover. By all indications AI will be even more disruptive, particularly since it is disrupting high-income professions. Notably, artisans whose jobs evaporated were not suddenly awash in a sea of abundance, as you seem to anticipate.
It can't be both ways. It will either be bad enough that most of us will still have jobs, or good enough that most of our needs will be solved.
AI will certainly be used to enrich the lives of a select few. It’s great to be in that group, assuming you don’t give a shit about the people who aren’t.
Self-driving cars are going to supplant human drivers. What do you think this is going to do to Lyft and Uber drivers, for whom this is already a job of last resort?
Do you think the ability to be driven around by robots is a net improvement for their lives? Do you think they will, now unemployed, be given these vehicles for free?
I’ll be honest, your comments strike me as you being completely ignorant of the existence of poverty. It quite literally took generations for the labor class to climb out of poverty brought on by the Industrial Revolution. Do you not understand that free gifts from the proceeds of new technologies are not simply handed out to those whom it displaced? The United States is one of the richest countries on earth, and an absolutely staggering percentage of its people live in poverty despite this enormous abundance. How do you square the existence of its poor? How do you have any expectation that you, yourself will not become one of them when 90%+ of people in your career are displaced, cratering wages?
Are you completely unaware of the accelerating rate at which wealth is being acquired by and hoarded by those who already have the most of it? Can you not recognize what the eventual conclusion of that process is, if not only left unchecked but allowed to accelerate?
Honestly your argument sounds detached from reality.
I would rather we not have technology than have people starving en masse. Literally our best hope is that the rich bastards are lying that they'll be able to do it to scam other rich bastards.
When I was in high school we were able to have an app that made it look like you were drinking beer. And the internet produced rainbow unicorn attack and nyan cat.
I was very optimistic about nyan cat. I'm very unoptimistic about nobody being able to afford computers for the next 5+ years.
Also since this thread is about general malaise - I am finding myself rather missing GW Bush's jovial brand of imperialism and cronyism. Strange fate.
The magic weight loss pill really is groundbreaking.
However, the gap has widened massively between who reaps the most from advancement.
Case point, uncle and aunt are wealthy. Last time i meet them they barely eat. Both on Ozempic. Neither are fat let alone overweight. This was years ago.
No one is excited because they do not just feel but are literally being left behind.
We do not have computers that think. And what we do have, if improved further, is likely to cause severe labor disruption, which could lead to mass riots and civil war if we're not careful. (And since when have we been careful?)
And don't forget that it will get worse every year for the rest of your life. Unless we cut CO2 emissions to 0, in which case it won't recover: it will just stay as bad as it is when we stop the emissions. But no need to think about all the disagreements coming from cutting our energy use (because cutting emissions means cutting energy use), because we just won't do it. So we can happily focus on the wars that will come from the energy crisis and enjoy the climate worsening every year.
Problem. solved.
"The obvious solution to this invasive species is to bring a predator from where they come from, so that it will regulate it. Problem solved".
5 years later, the problem is two invasive species. My point is that messing up with the climate is not necessarily a good way to fix the fact that we messed up the climate. Naive hope like this is simply dangerous.
And that's assuming that this ridiculous idea is actually possible in practice.
> The obvious solution to the earth getting too hot
What about the mass extinction we are measurably living in right now? It has nothing to do with the Earth getting too hot. We've lost 80% of insects, we are emptying the oceans... it's not a risk, it's happening. We measure it.
Temperature by itself is just the easiest to observe
And that's what gets you excited about the future?
(Song obviously nsfw without headphones.)
This hasn't changed much today, and I try to remind this period of my life when I catch myself thinking I wish I'd live through the AI revolution as a 20 something full of grit. Most of us realise we are experiencing glory days once they're gone (or about to end), so don't be too frustrated, and it's probably normal to be afraid of the future, we're surrounded by bad news and people preaching our great demise; it was already the case circa 2010.
I expect if we were to ask a 50 or 60 year old when the internet's glory days were, they'd go even farther back in time.
Then AOL etc. offered cheap dial-up, and suddenly you had all those noobs online ("Eternal September"). Been going downhill since then ;-)
I’m getting closer to 40, but I sometimes feel the same. Like people were buying houses for a fair amount of money in 90s-00s, when I was going to school. And now it’s like you need a fortune to do the same
But generally, I think it’s more about human psychology. For many people, the past may feel more attractive. It’s a mix of nostalgia, current day-to-day problems, and the fact that you cannot really get there to check if it really was that great :)
Human history has known much worse times than now, and I think we all need to remember that we shape the present and the future in one way or another. Yes, you and I have way smaller levers than D. Trump or Elon Musk or some average CEO, but we do still have. Every day we make decisions that influence our life and the lives of people around.
Don’t want to sound like that social media influencer, it’s just how I explain it to myself too
You can buy self driving car with 0 pollution and near 0 maintenance, insane performance for what, minimum salary more or less? What were the glory days?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27ll_own_nothing_and_be_ha...
Coincidently, in the Soviet Union, the propaganda had a similar tone about ownership: you’ll drive to the grocery store in a Lada, but can just switch to a limousine to drive back.
I wouldn't be so sure of that. But look at the bright side: By the time this administration's over, we'll all be billionaires!
Of course it's hard to be positive when you lost your job, I get that.
Energy will probably get cheaper and cleaner though, can't deny that. I'll just need something to run on that energy.
Citations needed. From what I see is
(1) the demand for electricity is growing at an explosive rate
(2) The AI data center build out is relying more on natural gas than you might expect. I believe it was the utah one that plans to build the world's largest gas power plant, which the next largest one is orders of magnitude smaller.
(3) The US is actively blocking hardware from China being sold in the US (low cost high grade solar panels, electric cars, etc.)
So, yes I deny that energy is getting cleaner and cheaper. In fact, I think it's going the exact opposite... It's getting more expensive and dirtier!!!
AI will crash, and once we're through the trough of disillusionment we'll see where it will shine and it will further increase our wealth and enjoyment of life.
If anyone feels negative, I recommend seeing a psychologist. There is no reason for anyone not to feel exceptionally optimistic about the future these days!
Not so sunshiny when you think about the millions of people struggling to have a meal each day.
But precisely that fact made life much less stressful than today: it was normal to be poor, it was normal to die young.
Telling everyone that disagrees with you to see a psychologist is certainly something. The delusions of grandeur may make your statement quite ironic, heh.
"Take him to a psychologist" was standard playbook in soviet block to silence dissent. Everyone knows of the gulag archipelago but just declaring someone insane was part of the toolkit.
Sure big screen TVs have progressed, but let's not ignore that the changes of the world are regressive for some.
But there are people ruling us that literally do this, and don't give me the "muh conspiracy", we have proof now, there are pictures and videos and literal proof in those E files.
Plus we have our countries supporting another country murdering hundreds of thousands of children.
Obviously the mods will delete this comment because duh, but for the short time it's here, the things I'm talking are facts and you value the wrong things.
>we live the longest
Does it feel like winning to be stressed and anxious until you're 90 instead of having meaning and going out at 75?
>I have electricity
... I don't know what to say to that, seriously.
>I can talk with friends all over the planet for free, instantly
Yet we have fewer and fewer real friends we care to meet
>I can get to anywhere on the planet within a day
You can't be in two places at the same time, how can this be an argument?
>There is no reason for anyone not to feel exceptionally optimistic about the future these days.
MF they're literally trying to start WW3 wtf are you talking about?
>If anyone feels negative, I recommend seeing a psychologist.
It feels like a passage from Thus Spoke Zarathustra if it was written today, it's crazy how this reads like a "last man" manifesto.
Truly a dystopian comment, I hope you can eventually open your eyes.
https://now.tufts.edu/2026/03/09/why-arent-americans-living-...
(The most plausible hypothesis I’ve found for this is that bad news - fire, predators nearby - has historically been much more likely to kill you than good news to benefit you, so we are descended from people who over-weighed bad news, and survived to reproduce.)
Modern media seems to really lean into this. All takes on everything are The Worst Possible Take. I heard Twitter described yesterday as “gain of function research for takes”. It’s not that the takes have to be bad, they just have to provoke a strong reaction, and bad news just gets a stronger reaction in humans.
“Cure for death found - social security bankrupt!!”
We have become more anti-fragile: and good things are way more likely to benefit us than before, and bad things less likely to harm us. Eventually we will evolve into this, but it will take literally generations!
Anyway, given people’s tendency to give bad news more weight, and given that most media is strongly negative, it is no wonder that people can come to believe that everything is terrible and that we are all doomed and that humanity has never had it worse. This seems absolutely ridiculous to me, comically so, but it seems almost tautological to many people. And telling them that things are actually great can seem like an attack!!!!!
If people don’t carefully curate their media environment, it is almost inevitable that they’ll become negative about the future. I don’t know what to do about this in general, but I know that I have to be very careful about what I consume. (And be gentle toward people who have been harmed by consuming too much negative for too long. I don’t think a psychologist can help though!)
I should submit this to HN, in fact. It doesn't seem to have ever been submitted.
We are. It is much easier to be negative than positive.
Perhaps they should have seen a psychologist. When we'll lose our jobs due to AI, we'll all have plenty of time to go to psychologist, indeed.
[1] : https://www.iom.int/fr/news/2024-ete-lannee-la-plus-meurtrie... [2] : https://news.un.org/fr/story/2025/12/1157994
Nobody is saying "everything is exactly perfect for every person on earth."
There's never been a time in history when that was true and there never will be a time when that will be true.
The point is you live in the most comfortable/easy/least violent/most democratic/longest lifespan/best healthcare/best technology/best educated/etc. time to be alive in all of human history.
On top of that, if you're on this website, according to similarweb you're one of the highest income and most educated people on the planet (you're the 1%).
So you're likely in the 0.005% luckiest humans to ever live, and yet you're pessimistic because some media channel preyed upon your empathy or fears of change to capture your attention so they can monetize it selling ads for toilet bowl cleaner.
The truth is some people just have a negative emotional disposition. Others have genuine issues in their lives they need to change. In all cases there are actions, medications and therapies for you. Seek help.
Pretending you're so virtuous as to care about all the worlds problems and yet also powerless to do anything about them is simply a giant excuse to never actually do anything but complain and contribute nothing to humanity.
Really? Because what OP said, it sounded similar:
>> If anyone feels negative, I recommend seeing a psychologist. There is no reason for anyone not to feel exceptionally optimistic about the future these days!
You sound like you're from EU, well, there are plenty of Syrians, maybe you should try to talk to some of them. It's cheaper than a psychologist.
The refugees you're hosting would much rather be refugees today (with actual legal rights in most developed countries) than refugees during any point in history, where they'd be more likely to end up slaves. There was never a time when being a refugee was a fun luxury experience.
Re: police harassing you, please tell me a time when humans weren't racist and were less racist than they are on average today?
Again, as I already said, yes everything isn't exactly perfect for everyone everywhere. My point is things are the best they've ever been for the vast majority of us. And most of humanity is working on improving things every day through the incentive system of modern global markets, and doing so successfully.
You want a time when humans were less racist ? Well.. I don't know.. Perhaps few years ago when far-right racist parties in Europe made up less than 30% in votes.
> If anyone feels negative, I recommend seeing a psychologist. There is no reason for anyone not to feel exceptionally optimistic about the future these days!
This is your point and I don't agree. Saying things are the best they've been is wrong. Things are the best for you. Not for "the vast majority of us". It is the best for the small minority. And no. It's not improving every day. In my first comment, I posted links with number of slaves all around the world and migrants dying, growing year after year.
Please, understand that while you feel optimistic, the majority of us, don't. Saying that we should see a psychologist is just rude. It seems that you are unable to understand other people feelings, thus, I would recommend you to see a psychologist.
You can't leverage yourself on an entire economy (the world's largest as of this writing) and not deliver the corresponding amount of value. This is exactly what AI's bubble is likely to do.
> There is no reason for anyone not to feel exceptionally optimistic about the future these days!
Yes, there are. You're obviously in a bubble.
"European heatwave is worst ever and impossible without climate crisis" [0]
"Nearly a quarter of the world’s nations are going through democratic backsliding, or autocratization, in 2025, and six out of the ten new autocratizing countries identified in the 2026 Democracy Report are in Europe and North America. Among them are large and influential countries like Italy, the United Kingdom, and the USA, according to the report authored by a team led by Professor Staffan I Lindberg at the V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg. The U.S. democracy is currently in a much faster deterioration process than any other democracy in modern times." [1]
"Based on current trends, progress against extreme poverty will come to a halt. As we’ll see, the number of people in extreme poverty is projected to decline, from 831 million people in 2025 to 793 million people in 2030. After 2030, the number of extremely poor people is expected to increase." [2]
Reasonable minds may of course differ about the future and all the problems and opportunities that lies ahead of us, but simply proclaiming there's "no reason" not to be "exceptionally optimistic" about the future, and recommending any skeptics to see a psychologist instead, is hard to classify as anything but a thought-terminating cliché. A society with such a mindset will find itself very ill prepared to solve a multitude of real and mounting challenges that require concerned minds and collective action.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/26/europe-h...
[1] https://www.gu.se/en/news/democratic-backsliding-reaches-wes...
But at least we have iPhones
Our expectations for what our life should be have just increased even more rapidly than our ability to pay for it.
As you say, rewind 100 years, and the child would take up all the time and become the entire purpose of your life, while living on 20 m² in many western countries.
If it worked then, it works now. Just man up, re-prioritize (if you really want a child that is, and not just a toy) and get on with it.
And, let's not forget that thanks to technology and the enormously positive developemtn of the world, the ones of us who do not want a child, can choose not to, while still enjoying life, and not be constrained by not having little workers on the farm. Truly life is good!
Parent is concerned about the reduction of independence heralded by centralizing control, wealth inequality, destruction of digital commons and other real downsides!
There was one odd graph. It showed that rising GDP lead to more happiness in every country except one: the USA.
In December Best Buy had a $1999 configuration of the M5 MacBook Pro on sale for $1749 and I scooped one up. Now that model is $2199. I suspect I could sell the computer I've been using for 6 months at a profit, which is just bizarre. But then of course it would cost a lot if I wanted to replace it.
I feel bad for people locked out right now, since it's become more interesting and important than ever.
At the time it seemed wasteful, but I'm happy to report that I'm putting it all to use now.
The same config on their site is now $8000 before taxes and AppleCare.
A couple weeks' notice would've been nice.
I did end up selling my best GPU, an RTX 4080. I had it for over three years and got ~80% of my money back.
You mentioned the COVID car market. The dealer we bought our Prius from sent us a letter during COVID offering to buy our car back sight-unseen for more than we originally paid. I regret not taking that deal, but at the time you couldn't replace it so what choice did I have...
We are truly entering the dark ages of personal computing.
Massive pushback (lagging, accessibility issues, slow) from workers was ignored and many people quit.
Sucks, but can't say I disagree with the fresh times though. There hasn't been a compelling need to upgrade all knowledge workers every 3 years anyway. An M2 air from 2022 is still fine today and will likely continue to be fine for at least another 3 years or more.
This has no bearing on your perception of ownership of your mobile device.
And thanks to Google Play Integrity, even if you do liberate your device from megacorp control, you still don't get to actually use it.
"Go buy any other device" is not working out. (There should be some laws to rectify this, imo.)
fwiw, I don't hate the thin-client model for dev work (via ssh, certainly not RDP - I've done both), but I despise the implications of _having_ to do it.
I suspect a lot of mac users are in the same place, and Apple knows it.
This is one of my biggest fears of this whole thing, that personal (local) computing is going to effectively die.
I mean Micron exited the consumer market entirely. All fab capacity is going to HMB, not consumer chips. The cartel has zero desire to make consumer hardware anymore, AI/data centers are far too profitable for them. Micron just reported gross margin of 85%.
So the cartel is raking in the dough selling shovels, screwing consumers, with long term supply deals already in place, they have no need to even think about the personal computer market (or chips for anything else either, this is going to cascade into automotive and elsewhere) until at least 2028-2029.
I'm sure Microsoft is frothing at the mouth to sell people thin clients with a Windows 365 subscription, and I wouldn't be surprised to see the new XBox go all in on cloud gaming like GeForce now.
We're stuck in this situation until/unless the AI buildout slows or stops in some sort of market correction.
I’m not happy with the price increases either, but saying this is the end of personal computing or that the next step is dumb terminals for everyone is very the-sky-is-falling.
Edit: Also Intel Core 5 320 that's way slower than the Neo, with same amount of RAM
Arrant nonsense, the Core 5 comfortably beats the A18.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+5+320&id...
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Apple+A18+Pro+%28Ma...
n.b. the Geekbench multicore test is more like a 2-core test because it adds lock contention, which is arguably closer to the real use case for these machines but isn't what you normally think of a multicore test doing
"Roughly equal" seems to be a more accurate description.
Now somehow openAI has capacity and Apple does not. And think about it Apple is not in a better position than Valve for example. A teeny tiny company in comparison.
It is an unprecedented managerial failure.
Just like US had oil but as the world prices went up, US oil prices went up. No one will sell it cheap inside the country for patriotism. Same thing here.
Of course they likely had / likely have some issues, but we should explain it as market forces rather than any struggle they are facing.
If not, they ordered less chips. Hence lost capacity.
About pricing, Netflix is constantly raising its prices and making more and more money (their stock is broken for last few months only) because they learned how to maximize profit by serving less customers but more profitable customers. Thats just one example.
All I am saying is that price stability is not guaranteed and is not a corporate goal so whether they failed here, whether they regret something, it is not possible to judge that just from price increase. Maybe they did, maybe they did much better than we know today and will find out next year (or quarter).
It is sort of Apple's fault. They are probably the biggest single buyer of DRAM and NAND globally and they pride themselves on their supply chain management under Cook.
It seems they over optimised this too far.
Timeline 2-3 years 10-20 billion dollars...
Note:(Microsoft thru the end of this year will spend 60-80 billion dollars on Capex and Google will spend 180 billion dollars).
Speaking of which, what's the timeline of the RAM shortage ending? I have no sense for whether it is going to be (for example) 6 months or 3 years.
Barring unusual market forces like Taiwan invasion the timeline to ending the acute shortage seems to be mid 2028. The AI still has plenty of money to burn and is the biggest driver, but we’re also shortly before gaming consoles ought to release a new gen (although who knows whether they won’t get delayed for a while). There was even going to be a small upgrade cycle for nerds waiting for 2nm fabbed devices, same as pre-ai datacenters looking for power efficiency. Plenty of pent-up demand, too, as many people simply make do with what they have but will upgrade once the silliness stops.
If you’re looking for ssd/ram prices to go back to the low of 2024/early 2025 it probably won’t happen before China catches up, which will be a while yet. There is some build up of new capcity happening from current manufacturers but it’s significantly less than what the demand increased by.
Are many DRAM fabs in Taiwan? Does TSMC manufacture DRAM for SK Hynix, Samsung, Micron, or CXMT?
And now China knows that both US and EU are weak and cant even deal with Russia or Iran.
And they also have their own semiconductors manufacturing and cut off from what TSMC produces anyway.
Eventually supply and demand will get back in a better balance and we will probably see prices rise slower than inflation until adjusted for inflation prices are close to to where they were before but the actual dollar price isn’t likely to go down.
Look at the AWS Prime ssds available, and it's a massive list of strange drives you've never heard of, with very few reviews available, almost all using YMTC. The prices aren't fantastic, but given that five sixths of the drive market is straight up gone, I think we need to start reviewing and hoping for the best here, fast. I really hope endurance is indeed as rated, that we aren't about to all get burned incredibly badly for using YMTC chips.
CXMT is indeed starting to get some ram out there. But I am pretty skeptical it's going to make much of a dent. They're currently single digits % of the world ram production. They need to scale a lot to make any dent, and as soon as they do, it feels like there's plenty of people ready to snatch up those supplies.
We need massive massive massive growth in availability and there's no sign that current scale up plans will be at all adequate.
Where?
I had two KingSpec SSDs sourced from AliExpress that failed too soon: one used YMTC and the other used Intel chips. Both failed within 1 to 2 years.
I have another one which is 5 years old by now.
https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/chinas-cxmt-is-set-to-...
At current margins their capacity is going to commodity DRAM since their HBM process is not competitive. Will be interesting to see how it pans out
Anyone making hardware is having a rough time. Like Valve who had to release their new PC at around 40% more expensive than what they originally wanted.
My advice didn’t make it a week before the price increases.
Look, this is going to suck for several more years. The western memory cartel was never truly dismantled or punished after their price fixing in the early 2000s, and now this is the result. With Chinese DRAM and NAND makers on the entity list, western countries don’t really have an alternative but to suck it up and ride out whatever this market is, be it bubble or blessing.
That said, China isn’t stupid and is gladly steering their domestic firms to produce more kit not just for data centers and AI customers, but to shore up domestic electronics manufacturing in general. If China can make a device that appeals to Americans en masse, western companies are arguably at their most vulnerable in the face of sky-high part costs and supply chain issues. Combined with rising public sentiment against data centers and a general “fed-up” attitude towards tech in general, and this could be quite the explosively expensive powder keg depending on how things end up shaking out.
American companies, you mean.
Thankfully there's Taobao and AliExpress for the rest of us.
So yeah, you’re more right than you may realize.
My problem with buying SSDs on AliE is with reasonably priced products that use NAND chips with no consideration for their quality grade. Vendors are not transparent.
NVMe SSDs are usually better in this regard, but SATA SSDs became a nightmare to purchase.
I priced it out today. The same spec (I think) is $2,000 more expensive.
I wasn’t expecting a jump that big. I can’t justify carrying around an $8,000 laptop.
It's just component suppl and that supply is being eaten up and re-diverted to data centers. Prices and availability will be in poor shape. Though I am wondering if GPU compute and memory start to diverge enough that AI companies begin using such specialized chips they stop threatening consumer devices. Maybe that's just wishful thinking.
In the 2010s this became less so with the ramp up of cloud computing, mobile computing, and death of Moore’s law. Now personal computing is a footnote that generally takes the left overs from mobile or server and will continue to get squeezed due to lack of meaningful market demand.
Prices must come down not because AIs switch to accelerators - they still need huge amounts of ram for inference* AND training - but because if RAM isn’t a pricing cartel then supply will increase.
* Technically there’s at least one company I know of burning models into ASICs but you still need the RAM to store the weights. SRAM is too power and heat heavy but RAM will only get a reprieve if Cerebras pans out and given OpenAI is the company that partnered with them and then cornered the DRAM market it suggests there’s challenges scaling that approach.
Dont get the panic. :)
ryzenn 9800x3d 32GB ram 9070xt
about 2k
So you can expect ~2-4 more years of updates for an M1. Even after no updates, you can probably still use it longer.
Or, this could just be a convenient excuse to get even more margin.
I am personally working on the assumption that prices will go up again this year or say in January, though as I have an M1 Max here it's not massively urgent.
I’d wager the odds of another price hike like this over the next two years is essentially zero, and past that extremely unlikely for the next several years. Barring of course some new and as-yet unknowable seismic shift like we’ve just seen with memory prices. They would never do something like this only to pull the rug again on customers half a year later if there was any possible way to make this kind of change once.
If anything, the most I would expect to see is individual products getting re-tweaked up or down $50, $100, or $200 over the next few years as demand adjusts and component prices settle.
I’m guessing they are doing their best to maintain margins. I don’t know what Apple’s cash chest has these days but it’s always been enormous.
But they don’t score points in the stock market by having cash on hand. They do get points for operating margin.
What's worse is that this is probably going to get worse. My angel investment group is getting inundated with pitches that amount to building an RX-6000 with 96GB of RAM and installing a local model to do "thing X".
So even if the OpenAI's of the world stop trying to use up all the RAM, you're going to have thousands of start-ups pushing local models.
If Apple can't pull it off with their supply chain weight they can throw around, what is that thing going to be priced at? Microsoft/Nvidia are either going to be subsidizing it or it's gotta be close to $8,000+ at launch.
Why would anyone need that much RAM in a laptop?
Apple would be in a much stronger spot right now if they didn't pretend like eGPUs were inconceivable black magic that Macs are incompatible with.
In particular though, the fatal bottleneck is the weakness of the iGPU. Filling a KV cache on a 100gb+ model could take a few minutes, or even hours if you're trying to restore a 256k-to-1m token session.
This is already a thing
In general LLMs are bottlenecked by memory bandwidth rather than raw compute power.
And once the context gets large, it slows down.
"up to" 150, is doing a lot of work there.
But it's usable, fully local, fully private, and has no subscriptions and no operating costs other than electricity.
The same spec machine I got yesterday is now $2800 more.
I'm on an M2 Max and looks like I'll be holding onto this thing for a few more generations.
I wanted a Studio, but if I was going to get a Studio, I'd get something older because they crippled the current models.
I have an M2 Max, as well, and I wonder what I could get for it on resale... or maybe I should just keep it.
Previously, at least in the U.S., you could just use the education store and get the discount without much (if any at all) verification.
All the people running any computer appreciate.
Want to edit a video? Pay a subscription for a Microslop Pro Max Windows $50/mo, then pay another $50 the NVidia Pro GPU add-on (the gaming version is slightly cheaper, but we can't let you use that since it's against the ToS), then another $50/mo for Adobe Premiere + $20 extra for the 4K export option. But you've already used up your monthly quota for it, so you pay another $50 for reset the limit. Then your machine doesn't have enough storage, I guess it's time to upgrade the cloud storage subscription too, that will be another $50 please.
Thank you and have a nice day!
You can run slack, teams, outlook, Spotify, figma, and just about everything else in a browser tab; you get Linux support for free and you are only running one browser instance.
Trying to vibe as many of my own CLI toolings as possible....
This ram/storage ai datacenter bullshit is bullshit, we are going to spin up these massive datacenters and someone is going to invent a way out of the current thinking before half of them are even built.
What's the over/under on apple spinning up their own fabs for their own needs in the consumer market? It seems almost suicidal to not start trying to take on that part of their vertical.
Darn close to 0%. They generally go after multiple manufacturers for a part rather than trying to become a manufacturer themselves.
They are trying their decades-old playbook of funding creation of new factories. The problem is the manufacturers are already neck deep in trying to expand out capacity, and the demand/price increases likely weakens both of Apple's negotiating factors (guaranteed sales and a source of capital to build out the facility).
Once I move from the mini to the MacBook it looks like I can get $800 for the mini. I got 0% financing too.
The way I approach these purchases is amortized cost over time. I do not expect prices to be lower in 2 years but if I can keep using my older hardware for longer, I am more open to absorbing the blow of the higher cost down the road.
The datacenter builders and the big hosted AI models. The person you're replying to even mentions OpenAI by name.
I also wouldn’t be surprised if memory providers weren’t intimately involved, as they’ve been caught price fixing in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal
Alleviating the memory constraint would only really make Nvidia a danger to cloud margins, and their consumer sales are neutered while they focus on the datacenter segment. It's feels facetious to insinuate that people would be doing inference on their Macbook Neo or Wintel laptop if they only had a gorbillion gigabytes of memory and a 400W accelerator card plugged into the wall outlet.
There is a pretty large and growing community of us using entirely local models for our agentic flows. From GLM 4.7 flash on 32gb machines with >60tok/s to Gemma and Qwen dense and MOE models on 64gb machines all the way up to Deepseek V4 flash on 128gb machines with 450tok/s prefill and 25-30tok/s decode.
I use DS4 on the daily - it’s become my main model.
I know it’s in fashion to talk trash about Apple but their hardware outperforms other options like DGX Sparc when it comes to local inference, they got the unified memory, memory bandwidth and the GPU cores to actually be useful in a way that most other hardware just isn’t.
I also use it in local agent mode if im coding directly on the machine which is nice cause you can save sessions and resume them, and so for personal projects and training related stuff it's been great.
Even got an autoresearch loop going where the agent looks at the previous run, adjusts parameters and code if needed, and then hands off training to another script (so full system resources are available for training), ad infinitum - it works really well - what antirez has done with that project is pretty incredible.
Which provides a 2-bit quant and a mixed 2-bit/4-bit quant - which range from 80gb to 97gb
Deepseek is particularly well suited for quantization and the quality of the 2bit quants antirez has provided have been validated by folks like ggernov of llama.cpp project
GLM 4.7 Flash is a 30b model that was far behind SOTA at launch, and I know that because I pay for z.ai inference and have run the model locally. Qwen and Deepseek V4 Flash have the same issue, and beg the question; are you really going to process a 64k agentic context at 450tok/s? That's 2+ minutes that you spend waiting for the first token to generate! Of course nobody can sell that as competitive inference, and it only gets worse with larger models. We're talking about non-interactive speeds, here.
If you're satisfied with small local models, more power to you. It puts you in the same barrel as Strix Halo enthusiasts or the guys that bought 2x3090s on Reddit. You are completely ignoring the market if you think that any of those SOCs are unprecedented or unparalleled for inference workloads, though. The free DS4 API is faster at prefill and decode, you could not give away Mac inference at zero cost and compete with what China provides for free. That's how far behind Macs are for local inference, to put things into perspective.
On your first point, nobody is pasting 64k tokens at once as context, if you are you’ll experience very similar wait times even with hosted providers - context is built up piecemeal and by virtue of being context does not need to be replaced constantly - this is how all agents work.
100% local models are not SOTA, but they are good enough to be incredibly useful if you are a skilled engineer, and I understand the industry is pushing engineers to offload more and more of their work to incentivize higher token spending, but talented engineers can absolutely be just as productive using local models today - it’s just a different style of working that folks who have become accustomed to large providers can’t really comprehend at this point. They’ve vendor-locked themselves into a delusion that they absolutely need SOTA for everything and as a result see everything as black and white.
You're completely right that the math changes with a $10,000 laptop though. Damn that number just sounds bonkers every time :)
Hey, Infantino was ahead of the curve! For the same price as an English MBP, you can get an American one and see the Three Lions disappoint against Panama!
There are two things that would prevent people from using local models - pricing and regulations. And we're seeing moves from both of those fronts lately.
So yes, inflation on average is nowhere near as high as in RAM prices.
What other things have been getting cheaper in the last ~2 years?
And as it's an average of many things, it's quite easy to change which 'things' it is calculated upon to show whatever number is more convenient politically.
Used cars & trucks; butter; cheese; flour; chicken; textbooks; drugs are all down since ~2 years ago. Not an exhaustive list!
Some day we will look back and think about how dumb we were to allow them to lie to us about what inflation really is
No, I don't think food, gas, and house prices, have 5x'd in price like RAM has. This is abundantly obvious.
The base model 14" MacBook Pro released in 2021 was $1,999. Today, Apple raised the price of the current base model to, you guessed it, $1,999.
And of course it should go without saying that the current models are substantially better.
Edit: don't know where that $1,299 came from, Apple's announcement says $999: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/11/introducing-the-next-...
That's a 30% increase. Over 5.5 years, that's right about 5% per year.
Small tweaks to macro-economic calculations, can turn into a huge divergence very fast. A one degree error in a compass read seems small...but after a thousand miles, your destination is history.
Tis reaching (or reached) a stage where mostly everyone is blind as to where the economy actually is.
Mega private companies now hire stat firms to run such studies in-house, ignoring gov data[1]
[1] https://rsmus.com/insights/economics/the-rise-of-private-lab...
Also, leave the multi-trillion company alone
https://slickdeals.net/f/19653138-update-apple-price-increas...
> M5 MacBook Air - $949.00 (now $1,299.00 at Apple)
M5 MacBook Pro - $1,549.00 (now $1,999.00 at Apple)
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/25/beat-apples-price-hike/
I’d like to not upgrade until they offer OLED on the Air (I use it solely as a travel machine), but I might be waiting for a while…
They don't have much choice but to phase out Intel support, but they absolutely can make the choice to extend support for anything they make themselves, and they may well judge that deciding not to abandon support for the more price-sensitive to tide them over is worth the extra engineering cost.
I personally will work on the assumption one more price rise is coming this year.
I suspect you cannot simply sprinkle AI functionality through an OS and manage the difference between unified and non-unified VRAM without noticeable tradeoffs.
The marginal impact of adding some tiny amount of foundational model use to an existing app function is very different between the two.
More so if you want to augment some existing functionality with model use, more so still if you were going to replace some functionality with model use (which I suspect is not yet happening).
You could do it if you were not concerned about surfacing the RAM/VRAM implications to the user through seemingly arbitrary clashes (worse graphics performance or not being able to use the GPU to process some video because you have the larger foundation model loaded, or an AI function refusing to run because another task has booked a lot of VRAM).
But Apple tend to be concerned about surfacing that sort of internal concept. Going forward with Apple Silicon alone means a bunch of questions like that simply don't come up.
I have an Intel machine that Tahoe already doesn't support and I gather I am going to get patches and new Safari until at least autumn 2027, when it will be nine years old.
Apple appear to have said that Intel machines that Tahoe _does_ support, at least, will get patches until the end of 2029.
ETA: I see what you mean about my saying "what they make themselves" which I happily concede was woolly word choice (it is very very hot here in the UK today), but I still think this makes sense to say; they can make decisions about future changes to their own architecture that are either more or less likely to obsolete the M1, and more importantly, most of the architectural decisions that might affect OS support will bring the M1 along with it (modulo some stuff affected by the distribution of the ANE processors).
A lot has changed in the tech world since the last Intel Mac; there is nothing they can now do to change the outcome for those machines.
I have a macbook pro wit m1 pro and I was waiting for the mac mini m5 pro, but I might pull the trigger on the macbook pro m5 pro. Ugh.
Every friend I asked about why they don't buy Apple TV, "I don't need TV apps" was the reason. Guess what, many of them still wanted smart home integrations so they brought smart home hubs from Google/Amazon or other vendors for not much lower price, even when they already use and like iPhone and other Apple devices.
Some of these responses to my above post are a bit haughty. I'm just reporting from the trenches that the Apple tax is real, not everyone can afford to keep paying up, and a 20% cost increase is huge.
Omg. Going short AAPL 10x leverage!
I don’t think the market shopping for $600 laptops is the same market that wants something that runs Linux.
So, Linux won't consume LESS unless you spend your time configuring different stuff.
I can't imagine users want to mess with this instead of buying macs.
https://www.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/1qqyh2z/scro...
Linux is not an operating system (as people know it). Ubuntu is, Fedora is, etc. Like you said, "install Linux" is meaningless and leads you down a rabbit hole of "what distro." Just say "Install Fedora KDE" or whatever.
But even saying "Install Fedora KDE" is going to alienate an enormous group of the general population. We can manage it, gamers can largely manage it, and someone relatively tech-adjacent can handle it. The completely non-technical person that does most of their computing on an iPhone? Not a chance in hell you're going to get them to download an ISO, flash a USB drive, and boot from it. Queue up the questions "Wtf is an ISO? I haven't had a USB drive in 10 years...what is an operating system?"
Remember that OEDC study? About 80% of the global adult population is functionally computer illiterate when it comes to solving problems or doing tasks that aren't completely on rails. 24% of adults cannot use a computer at all. An additional 14% can only do one-step, highly guided tasks like click a single link, or delete a single email. Another 29% can use a web browser or email basically but struggle with any task that requires navigation or multiple steps.
Being in tech and in tech communities its easy to assume some basic level of competency, but that level does not exist. I've experienced it first hand throughout my career in IT. Most people where I work struggle with the concept of basic file management, let alone anything more advanced than sending an email or finding a file.
Year of the Linux Desktop will never happen without mass market preinstalls as the default choice.
The Year of the Linux Desktop won't be when everyone switches to Linux. You can't save everyone, there will always be iPads and gaming laptops that will never see proper Linux support. OP's point seems to be that higher device prices will push people to get more mileage out of depreciated Intel Macbooks and Windows 10 desktops. Price increases will outright prevent some customers from engaging in the upgrade cycle altogether, which is why a lot of enthusiasts and gamers have already switched to Linux distros for extended support.
If this squeeze continues, more and more low-income computer users will defect from the upgrade/service treadmill. It won't be a firehose of defectors, but it's already enough to make an impact.
> Normies that watch LTT, Gamers Nexus or Jayztwocents have been exposed to Linux already.
Aren't normies at all. The 80% that are functionally computer illiterate aren't watching LTT. Someone with enough interest to follow gaming/tech youtube channels can probably already handle installing Linux with a little handholding.
I agree on your other point though, you can't save everyone. We'll just bifurcate. That 80% just won't own a general purpose computer at all outside of what is provided by their employer. They'll use their smartphone, and maybe an iPad. The desktop/general purpose market will shrink, but Linux definitely is ripe to take nearly that entire market as it is now effectively becoming an enthusiast only market.
If I needed to change a kernel version, it's literally as easy as selecting it from a menu in a pre-installed GUI "update manager", letting it do its thing and rebooting. I can get up to the bleeding edge (although I have no good reason to).
Edit: I'll say that now it seems also very hard to justify buying top of the line apple hardware for the enterprise. Getting top laptops for just a team of 10 people now means extra $20k just for RAM on top of already a higher base price.
Just bought a MacBook Air that I didn't need to hedge in case my current laptop breaks down. Won't be buying it at the higher price.
also, apple is a luxury brand first and foremost.
Now their sales will go down as a result of the failed planning. But more importantly lost once in a lifetime opportunity to corner the entire personal computer market
lol.
Apple could have added a couple trillions to their valuation if they weren't addicted to service revenue. But today's Apple is too fat to see their shoes, let alone where the puck is headed.
I owned a cheesegrater 2019 Mac Pro. Up until the introduction of the Apple Silicon Mac Pro (which I was eagerly watching for because in my upstairs office where I had not got to redoing the insulation after buying my home, the thermal output of the Xeon and everything in it were excessive), in June 2023, Apple had not changed the prices of anything - you would still pay 2019 prices for a 2019 processor, 2019 prices for memory ($3,000 for 160GB of socketed RAM), 2019 prices for SSD and video.
(b)? I'll give you that, so it's not "new models launch with a price hike", it's "new models launch at comparable prices (to the old models which just got a price hike)".
More realistically, though, I'm surprised they didn't eat it up until new releases when they often increase prices. All the current models will be gone in a year and they'd probably barely notice that. Perhaps they've been eating it up for the past year or two and push came to shove.
There may be an element here where announcing new hardware at a 30% higher price would largely make the latter the focus point, so instead they chose to take the hit of the price hikes separately.
A single rack of NVIDIA’s GB300 uses 20TB of HBM3E and 17TB of LPDDR5X. There could easily be a thousand racks of these in a large datacenter.
So an approximate entire years worth of ddr5 ram demand from Apple equals approximately 1 single datacenter.
I can see how they succumed to the pressure.
[1] https://www.tweaktown.com/news/104073/macbook-pro-is-reporte...
[2] https://frame.work/pl/en/blog/updates-on-memory-pricing-and-...
Just look at what AI (in the form of LLMs) is doing to the rest of the computing industry because of throwing insurmountable levels of debt into data centers instead of researching efficient methods for running 1TN+ parameters language models locally or even to gain the same performance, intelligence equivalent without such large parameters.
It just tells you that AI is at the point where personal computing is going to price out a lot of people if it doesn't get cheaper. Until there are viable efficient methods in running 1TN+ parameter models or a smaller model performing at the equivalent or better than frontier models, we will continue to see more of this in the future.
This happened when Ethereum was a proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain and then switched to an environmentally efficient method of consensus (Proof of Stake) which the demand for GPUs fell sharply afterwards.
> AI is much worse because the scale is OOM greater, but crypto/blockchain effects on the market weren't harmless either.
AI on the other hand has done the exact opposite and has little to show to make things efficient.
Instead, companies are buying up the world's supply of GPUs and building hundreds of data centers because that is the laziest way to scale up and then laying you off to pay for it all.
But as soon as I heard Cook say they're planning price increases last week, I ran out and bought a 15" M5 Air 24GB/1TB for $1444 at MicroCenter.
The M6 Pro/Max MBP generation is going to be super expensive given the RAM and storage costs, brand new design, OLED, and TSMC N2 node.
The M5 is also significantly faster than an M1 Pro. I definitely feel the snappiness on day to day use. I'm also upgrading from 16GB/512GB to 24GB/1TB.
The screen is quite a downgrade and the battery life, surprisingly, is only marginally better than my 5 year old M1 Pro with only 79% capacity left.
Other than that, I don't miss anything else about the M1 Pro. I hear rumors that they're making a smaller MBP in the M6 Pro/Max generation which is why I wanted to wait originally.
On the flip side, this makes PC options with GPUs more attractive.
I’m interested in running local AI models.
I can't imagine a margin that large is allowed to exist unchallenged for more than a few years.
Immense profits have proven a very endurable shield against upstarts for "big tech" so... we'll probably end up watching regulators attempt to dismantle the RAM cartel throughout the 2040s.
It's more likely that China will simply impose export controls. It's unlikely Chinese fabs will be able to fulfill local demand, leave alone global, for the foreseeable future. And they do need these components for their own manufacturing.
> Apple is a fabless manufacturer; production of the chips is outsourced to contract foundries including TSMC and Samsung.
I know I'm already priced out for many server providers, including more budget-oriented ones like Hetzner.
I fully expect the air to last me at least another 6 years or so for my use case. The thing is a beast.
Compare this to a Dell laptop I bought when I started college, that thing was 850 dollars and died on me within 3 years. For Apple, I could justify spending more (maybe even 20% more) considering both Apple computers I’ve had feel extremely fast. The only reason I dropped the 2019 MBP was battery fatigue (and I probably could have repaired it for 100$ and gotten another 3-4 years out of it. But the new air was just too attractive).
https://9to5mac.com/2026/06/25/micron-exec-suggests-apples-a...
e.g. The HomePod and HomePod Mini share the same amount of RAM, but the HomePod is up $50 while the HomePod Mini is only up $30.
I’m surprised that iphones didn’t get a price raise while neo did. Neo seems like a clear market share attempt so that they can upsell on services, I would’ve expected either both of those or neither to get dinged.
Treat yoself Tim Apple!
I have three Apple TVs that are ethernet connected and form the backbone of my home's Thread network, but they have <5 apps installed and would do fine with 32gb rather than 128gb. (And in fact, they are all currently 32gb models from the previous generation where those did include ethernet.)
That's the kind of pricing that makes me start to consider the Google 4K Streamer even if it's a UX downgrade - for $300 I get ethernet and Thread on every TV.
Breakdown by segment (FY 2025):
Mac: $33.71 B — 8.10% of total revenue
iPad: $28.02 B — 6.73% of total revenue
I'm betting that Apple is betting that the fed isn't going to get it together and whip it in time.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/may-inflation-repor...
And if that is not true, perhaps it isn't really a commodity at all.
The thing I'm keeping my eye on is iPhones. I destroyed my iPhone on a multi-day hiking trip a few years ago and, for international travel, I really like having a workable backup which, if I could even find it, my iPhone X isn't at this point. Could buy something used I suppose but probably better just biting the bullet and getting something new.
Not that they will start making memory themselves, but they have bankrolled production expansions in their suppliers before in exchange for guaranteed supply.
In any case, if my guess is right, it would take years to take effect.
> Cook said Apple is willing to deploy its balance sheet to help secure supply and called for all options to be examined, including a review of national security restrictions on Chinese memory suppliers. He ruled out building Apple's own memory factories.
Models with US keyboards currently still sell for CZK 19 990, Czech keyboard models sell for CZK 21 990 ($1050), probably someone forgot to update the price on the US models.
Need another up and coming person to flip the proverbial "IBM" the bird
Tough to break it to you, but the war on general purpose computing started a long time ago - primarily app stores and mass market managed OS's (iOS, Android). Why did it happen? Some will say it was necessitated by security in the Internet era, and they are right, but it was also a convenient way to transfer control from the personal computer user to the personal computer maker.
Absolutely awful timeline where the value of a PC goes up with time.
At least with the cheaper models, you get deals at Best Buy and Amazon.
I wonder whether this will also inflate the used market. I could have gotten more for my trade-in.
Oof. That and October delivery. I wonder if the intent here is basically just to signal to the market where the M5 Ultra Studio is going to start.
This is just the new normal.
While it wasn't a strict price decrease it was an improvement to the base model. The 24GB m3 air I bought a few months earlier would've been cheaper due to that if I held off for a few more months. Now w/ the price hikes the price I paid is now cheaper than buying a 24GB m5 air.
A base-config 2028 MBP could be running local LLMs at a level unthinkable today.
What's rare is that this is a price adjustment on existing shipping models, without a corresponding new model. I remember them doing price drops with a few Intel Macs in 2023, but otherwise the only example that comes to mind is the original iPhone.
Shielding is one way to describe it. Another is that you were overcharging so much earlier that you could absorb it.
amusing nonsense
Do they have a source for RAM that’s insulated from the global market?
but what i think they meant is framework is looking like a better deal now that macs are more expensive
Or are they also sharing the pain with the customer and partially increasing prices only?
Planning to snatch one from BB/Amazon.
I think this one paid off for all my other bad timings.
Edit: I paid $6,400 after taxes and the same setup is now at $9,850 before taxes. Whoa!
1: most of them dont use their own products
2: someone else pays for their laptops
I knew i should have bought a maxed one when i had the chance...
and then the monkeys paw curled
Outsourcing was a great idea for making America, your home, lose. Oh well.
Ternus can’t come fast enough to revamp their corrupt management system and actually innovate again.
In all seriousness this timeline we are on sucks. I hate it. Send me to another multiverse.
I suspect that these price increases will stick around permanently (or at least for a long while).
Honestly Jassey, Zuck and Tim Apple are prob on the phone with Donnie. If oil companies are “gouging,” what is 85% margins on memory, threatening the whole bull run and raising compute, Killing AI, and raising iPhone/computer pricing? Countdown to DOJ antitrust case is ticking.
To be clear: I understand how markets work, Im just quoting Donald Trump's tweet from yesterday calling oil companies gouging, and I predict government intervention and polital pressures regardless of economic realities.
https://www.micron.com/us-expansion/ny
https://www.micron.com/us-expansion/id
The first Idaho project is starting soon: "Micron has already achieved key construction milestones on its first Idaho fab with DRAM output scheduled to begin in 2027."
Micron executives, who typically offer cautious projections about the boom-bust memory business, said on their earnings call that “tight conditions” will persist beyond 2027. Just three months ago, they had projected tight conditions going only beyond this year.
In an interview Wednesday night, Micron Chief Business Officer Sumit Sadana said the company couldn’t make investments during the memory market’s last downturn, when Micron’s gross profits went negative, in part because certain customers took advantage to pay rock-bottom prices.
“We told a couple of the customers who were being very aggressive with pricing at that time that this is not constructive,” he said, without naming Apple, adding that low prices discouraged capital investments. “A lot of the industry investments got shut down in 2023 because of really poor pricing and really poor margins.”
The iPhone-maker is well known for using its huge memory and storage purchases as leverage to secure the lowest prices, say analysts and former memory company executives.
Antitrust =/= gouging. Jacking up prices during a shortage (eg. electric generators just before a hurricane) might be considered gouging, but it doesn't fall under antitrust. It's just supply and demand.
https://www.asianometry.com/p/the-semiconductor-bust-still-c...
It is a very risky business, overestimate demand by too much and you go bankrupt. And yes, it is hard, especially HBM. Fabs are scaling up, but it is hard to estimate demand in 2029, and it may be better to not overshoot.
They also need to get in line to buy ASML EUV tooling, and ASML has to deal with scaling for their suppliers as well. There are tons of bottlenecks and complexities.
It is a commodity in that there are standards, not that there are many firms that can hit the standards.
This isn't gouging, this is bidding on fixed quantities and bidders having a high willingness to pay. Think of it like an auction.
These decisions play out on the order of trillions of dollars and 3+ year horizons. They're also incredibly sensitive to other geopolitical issues (Taiwan, issues with Chinese tech capability vs export/import controls, etc).
There are a lot of valid discussions to be had about how we got to this state of oligopoly: Taiwan's consistent sponsorship of its semiconductor capabilities and the subsequent concentration of technology (expertise, capacity, etc), the lack of investment/support (and ceding of technical leadership) in Western countries, the various rivalries with China and the implications of it becoming a first-class producer of semiconductors at scale, etc. None of those discussions and none of their potential outcomes can substantively change that we're going to continue in this situation (massive price increases, spotty availability, etc) for at least the next 18-24 months.
Same with SSD. I could pay another $3,000 to Apple for 7TB of SSD (go from 1TB to 8), or I could get the 1TB, use that as a system drive, and then buy a 4xM.2 NVMe PCIe chassis, and put in 4x2TB Samsung 990 drives from Amazon and OWC for $1,100, and have 9TB of usable storage, and for bonus points, the chassis was about 400MB/s faster.
Maybe instead of antitrust the US could go back to tariffs, the universal cure for high prices.
One fix for this problem: Allow US companies to buy memory chips from China. I saw an article about a month ago, that if my memory is correct in this, said that China is ramping up high-end memory manufacturing.
Fix number two: my country (USA) should cease and desist with the craziness that is data center buildouts for AI.
Clearly ‘BIG MONEY’ always needs a new thing (cloud -> crypto -> AI) and the powerful get what they want.
If the US Congress acted to benefit regular people rather than special interests (both party's are corrupt, disbelieve that if you want to live in a fantasy land) then anti-dumping laws would be passed.
If all companies and individuals paid the real price for tokens, then we collectively would work more efficiently. As is, the filthy rich get even filthier, and regular people will get screwed.
How is that calculated?
I'm relieved.
that never happened before :)))
https://lowendmac.com/1999/power-mac-g4-yikes/
I have a 350MHz model that I purchased used for $40 back in 2009.
I’ve never seen across-the-board price hikes from Apple that were not accompanied with some type of upgrade.
What do you mean "eventually"?
Samsung $1.529 T SK Hynix $1.345 T Micron $1.343 T
Is this really the future we wanted?
Did farming implements and looms make food and clothing more expensive and scarce? No, they did the opposite, making both more readily available. So your comment is a disanalogy.
Not really. I said, "The technology itself may be neat."
There's a larger societal question: how many resources should we devote to this technology? The current answer appears to be "unlimited resources".
> AI is in demand and supply has not caught up.
The point is that we're currently suffering the many negative side effects of AI production, some of which I listed. Will there be a utopian future when the negative side effects are all eliminated? Maybe... or maybe not. In any case, it sucks right now, and relief does not appear imminent. Indeed, the Apple price increases are a sign that the component shortages are not just temporary, and even the wealthiest corporation in the world can't ride out the storm.
$500!! I mean that's not crazy surprising given price increase in the components I'm trying to buy (ram and hard drives, maybe an SSD) but damn. The M6 is probably the next laptop I'll get, I can only hope that component prices have calmed down by the time it's released but I'm not holding my breath.
Dont get the panic. :)
There is also no option for instalments and bank also refused loan as asset purchase.
Cool.
M5 Max MacBook Pro: $4,099 (up from $3,599)
M3 Ultra Mac Studio: $5,299 (up from $3,999
How can this be explained with price increases in Ram prices?
Come on Apple, don’t be so greedy. Make money but don’t bleed us.
No, no they don't. CPUs and GPUs do, broadly, but SSDs and RAM use specific processes catered only to their respective usages. You can't use a NAND flash process for anything else. Likewise for a RAM process.
I have some choice words for Sam Altman for destroying the personal computing marketplace by cornering the memory market…
Perhaps genuinely. It’s at the very least regularly observable that less educated, less ambitious individuals living closer to traditional lifestyles are happier and more content.
Now all of the businesses who use Apple products as an input are more likely to raise their own prices, etc. This is how inflation happens across the economy. Trade war leads to price increases on Apple's inputs, Apple has to raise prices, etc.
I thought the scenario would be "we're going to abolish income tax and implement a national sales tax or VAT!" but then the abolishing of income tax part never happens and we just get income tax plus national sales tax plus VAT.
Instead he did it with tariffs. Don't know if it's the biggest tax increase in history but it's pretty sizable, and of course it's regressive.
I'm not saying they're all great. In a democracy, especially when you face only a few options, it's always a lesser of two evils choice. I've never voted for someone I thought was great.
you can vote for the party that complains housing is getting more expensive while the states they run is full of the most expensive housing on average, or you can vote for the party who thinks deregulating everything is economically smart, but wont pass cost savings on to the buyer so the investment companies who only build communal housing and mcmansions see any benefit from it while your expensive shack falls apart in a decade or so.
but at least historically both parties agree that censorship is good, encryption should be kept from the plebs, and israel should get whatever it wants with a minimum of performative resistance sometimes.
or rather this: which party thinks that the rush to build ai data centers which are meant to create a chinese style ai surveillance state should be stopped on the premise that americans are survelied enough already and manipulated enough online as it is? there isnt one? if these parties were truly enemies they wouldnt consolidate more governmental power because obviously this power will fall into their enemies hands if there is a party switch in the federal government.
Kinda like MAGA. Their hair could be on fire and everything is fine.
In other words, we have to protect our billions of cash from burning.
They could keep the prices down, but then again for these C-suites everything should go up, right? Who cares if the market is “ready” for price jumps? Who cares when HDD, memory manufactures prioritize Sam Atmans? Heck, half-made, buggy games now starts at $80 price point.
It’s unfortunately billionaires’ world.
Apple won't get an exclusive deal to buy RAM for far less than the going rate.
I'm sure they're doing everything they can to cut their costs as well. That means even more profit. Lower costs only translates into lower prices if that results in more profit overall.
Apple already have such high profit margins and I’m pretty sure the next iPhones would be priced 100-200$ extra
The era of cheap high-end computing is likely over. And it'll be used to pressure people into switching to thin clients and ever-more subscriptions
High-end desktops were already a niche market, with many home users just using phones+tablets as their main devices.
The entire games industry is already in a big crash too, and with consoles approaching $1k for 6yr-old hardware (Xbox just had another price hike) it might not bounce back this time. A new generation of consoles isn't going to find such a huge market with 4-figure price tags, especially when there won't be a giant leap in visuals/capability.
But even if things recover in a few years, Apple makes a lot of money from massive markups on RAM and storage and not allowing upgrades. If their customers keep paying, and I suspect they will, there'll be no incentive to bring prices down, not for the higher-end devices at least.
Natural monopolies are a thing, and chip production has become pretty close to one with the vast resources and timescales required to attempt to compete.
I'm pretty sure prices are going down. Maybe not complete builds in nominal dollars, but $/gb for things like RAM and SSDs will be lower in 5 years than it is today almost certainly.
Why would this be the case? I don't see a fundamental market failure.
Well, pure capitalism. I suppose the terms are synonymous, though.
By the way OpenAI has postponed their IPO until next year 2027.